


Recondition

by Guede



Series: The Shop [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF Lydia Martin, BAMF Stiles, Bondage, Chastity Device, Dom/sub Undertones, Dubious Consent, Dubious Morality, Duct Tape, Erica Feels, Exhibitionism, F/M, Father-Son Relationship, Fisting, Gallows Humor, Grief/Mourning, Impact Play, Incest, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Non-Linear Narrative, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rough Sex, Sex Toys, Temperature Play, Torture, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-09
Updated: 2016-07-09
Packaged: 2018-07-22 13:20:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 44,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7440769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles and Lydia hunt down living people for dead people.  And if that sounds like a story you’ve heard before, it’s…not quite what you’re thinking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

At first Stiles doesn’t understand what his dad’s telling him because right as his dad says it, the werewolf in the ash circle screams so hard that even Lydia moves back.

“Sorry, what?” Stiles says, and then he raises the spare pair of noise-canceling headphones. Lydia takes them from him and then takes his laptop for good measure; he just has time to glimpse that she’s switching his playlist before she walks away.

_“Said, if you’re in the middle of one, I can find something to do for a couple days and we’ll meet up afterward,”_ his dad says. Even with the background screeching, he sounds a little awkward. He’s always giving Stiles outs these days, now that Stiles no longer needs them.

“No—no! No, it’s cool, this one’s kind of…actually, we were thinking about upping the manpower. Not that it’s going bad or anything,” Stiles reassures him, walking out of the room. He goes about a yard down the hall and then turns back, and rolls his eyes as Derek, kneeling just outside the doorway, looks at him like he’s been drinking too many triple espressos again. “It’s just, well, God, this Deucalion guy has a lot of cannon fodder. Like a lot. Like for a packless alpha, he has a whole pack’s worth of bodies to throw down, and anyway, no, we’d be glad to see you.”

 _“Yeah,”_ his dad grunts, moving something heavy. Sounding grateful and skeptical.

Derek grunts too, and then holds up two candles. Stiles squints, nods at the one in the man’s left hand, and turns around as Derek snorts and eels himself about the jamb and into the room without ever really getting up. “Whatever, I’m gonna be glad, and I know Lyds is dying to talk to somebody who isn’t picking bloody stuff out of their teeth. I missed you, Dad.”

It’s quiet on his dad’s end of things, but Stiles can still feel the way things thicken up. He almost reminds his father that it was okay, he understood why his dad needed the break in the first place and that wasn’t meant as a guilt trip or anything. But he knows his dad, and that’d just make things worse, and so he just stands there and gives the man a little space.

The werewolf lets out a scream that abruptly breaks towards the end into a descending series of sobs and broken cries that he’s sorry, that he won’t do it again, that if they just give him a chance, he’ll—he’ll swear loyalty, he’ll be their omega, just let him out, please. Stiles looks over at the doorway just as Erica, irritated as hell, pops out and shakes a demanding hand at him.

“Can he not shut the fuck up?” Erica snaps. “We’ve got another five to go, and that’s just his _pack_ , and Boyd and I are just so sick of his bullshit.”

“Well, I don’t think it bothers his pack so much,” Stiles drawls, peeking into the room at the wispy shapes patrolling the edge of the ash circle. “And hey, you and Boyd could always just go back to the hotel room and enjoy the complimentary spa—”

Erica jerks her hand up, only to hiss as another hand wraps around her wrist. Tsking and shaking his head, Peter smiles nicely at her before letting her go. She glares at him, then at Stiles, and then throws her hands up and storms back into the room. Stiles gives Peter another look and Peter drops the smile to give him an exasperated little shrug, like it totally wasn’t Peter’s job to remind people to charge up their phones. Because torture takes a while, and you’re gonna want your playlists.

“Come over here if you’re going to be like that,” Lydia calls. There’s a muffled, angry reply from Erica, and then the distinct noise of a stungun being charged up.

 _“Does sound like it,”_ Stiles’ dad suddenly says.

Stiles nearly drops the phone. He bats away Peter’s hand, ignores how miffed the man looks when he was just trying to be _helpful, Stiles_ , and twists back towards the hall. “C’mon, Dad, you know it. You know you want to come check, you know you’ve just been waiting for an excuse.”

 _“And that’s how I knew they’re there,”_ his father snorts. _“Trying to charm the pants off your old man, kid?”_

“You know it,” Stiles says, starting to grin. He gives the side of his head an absent rub, then shakes off the sweat that comes with it; he’s just thinking somebody needs to turn up the A/C when Peter sidles past him with a hip-brush and a little over-the-shoulder look, heading in exactly that direction. “Besides, like you aren’t being all vague as hell about whatever finally kicked you off the farm. I’m curious now, I hope you know, and know all the things that come with that.”

 _“Stiles,”_ his dad says flatly, and Stiles stops for a second because damn, but it must’ve been serious. Then the man sighs, and puts down whatever he’d been moving around. _“Okay, well, let me know where you are on Friday.”_

“Morning or afternoon?” Stiles says.

His dad makes a disbelieving noise. _“I’m gonna give Lydia a text too, if you’re that sloppy now.”_

“I—sloppy—am not!” Stiles says, outraged, as his father hangs up on him.

Peter comes back from the A/C and gives Stiles an inquiring look, which for some reason involves easing in till they’re pretty much pressing groins, neck crooked so Stiles doesn’t have to bend his arm so much when he reaches up and grabs that and forces Peter down onto his knees. He twists his fingers up into Peter’s hair, pulling hard so Peter’s hands just graze his hips and then drop off as the man muffles an openmouthed moan into the front of Stiles’ thigh.

“Stiles,” Lydia says, coming out into the hall with phone in hand. “Your dad—”

“Yeah, I know, and he was being a total laconic jerk to me so I think he actually means it,” Stiles says. He tugs at Peter’s hair again, moving Peter over towards his rising erection, and then relaxes as Peter starts undoing his fly with lips and tongue only. “You think he got laid? I think he got laid.”

Lydia glances at him, and then sighs and settles back into one of her classic not-doing-it-so-up-your-game poses, arms crossed over her with phone jutting out on one side, feet spread a little wider than her shoulders with her weight mostly canted onto the back, minimum-five-inch, heel.

“I think if they’re all going to take as long as Ennis here,” she says, not even pausing as Peter stuffs Stiles’ cock in his mouth and Stiles hiccups a little, no lie, he’s old enough now to admit he’s still always going to be kind of not-society-ready. “We could use that farm of your dad’s, if he’s still got it.”

“Well, it’s not really us, it’s up to the client,” Stiles reminds her, and then he raises his voice, leaning forward to grab Peter’s shoulder with his other hand. “Hey, Erica! How do you feel about horror ranches?”

“Will they stop bitching about how they could help us if we let them out?” Erica calls back. “Yeah, sure, you murdering asshole, how about you fucking bring _Boyd_ back? What? You can’t? Oh, I’m _so_ sorry, I guess you really can’t give me anything I want.”

Stiles looks at Lydia. “It’s a big ranch,” Lydia says. “You can actually walk out of hearing range.”

Ennis cries some more. Erica eventually slouches out of the doorway, a little twitchy, her hair frizzing in the front from how she keeps shredding the curls with her claws. “And do what? Look at cows?” she says.

“I—I don’t—cows but maybe you can—dunno, slaughter a—an elk or something,” Stiles grunts, as Peter moves from foreplay to pointed long sucks. “Look, I know—takes a while—but we—told you, priority—”

“Whatever, I just want to make sure he’s still got a goddamn voice when Boyd and I are up,” Erica says. She tosses her hand over her shoulder and then pushes past Lydia to stalk down the other end of the hall. Doesn’t even look down.

Stiles raises his brows, then bites down on a groan and jerks over, kneading Peter’s shoulders as he comes. He pants a few times, resets his hands on Peter, and then heaves himself up to see that yeah, Lydia’s still there.

“I’m glad he’s back, but I don’t know about that one,” Lydia says, much more quietly, with a tired little hook of her head back towards Erica’s departing form.

“Yeah. Yeah, I know, but a job’s a job,” Stiles says. “Right?”

She looks at him for another second. Then pivots and walks at a leisurely, commanding pace down the hall. Erica’s still going at a good clip, but Stiles can see her glancing over her shoulder, and for all that Lydia doesn’t look like she’s going as fast, the space between the two women is closing up.

“Speaking of,” Stiles says, looking down at Peter. He catches the man licking his lips and laughs and then grabs Peter under the jaw, pulling up before releasing that with a little flick of his thumb across Peter’s wet mouth. “Blowjob doesn’t get you out of the dirty work. Come on.”

“But Derek _likes_ doing it,” Peter pouts.

“Whatever, it’s not who likes it, it’s getting things cleaned up so we can get out on time,” Stiles says. He straightens out his clothes and walks back into the room. Derek hands him his earbuds and he pops them in, then turns up the music as all the ghosts start wafting over towards him, whispers crowding into his head. “You know this never ends up that clean.”

* * *

Stiles’ father shows up at the hospital just a couple minutes before Stiles’ mother breathes her last, covered in blood and grease from a car accident he’d been called to right beforehand. He mutters something about that accident but Stiles ignores it because yeah. Death right in front of them, don’t need to be bringing it from anywhere else.

Except _yeah_ , that’s kind of what happens after they have the funeral and her coffin’s safely in the ground. They hear voices. See things. It’d make sense if it had anything to do with Stiles’ mom, but it doesn’t. She’d been the first generation in her family born in the States, so why the hell Stiles is seeing people dressed up in turn-of-the-century clothing?

He starts spending a lot of time in the library and at the archives in town hall, and pestering the local historical society. His dad starts having a drink after dinner, and then two, and then one night his dad comes home, grabs the bottle off the shelf, and then goes out and doesn’t come back.

What Stiles should do is call up one of his dad’s fellow deputies. What Stiles actually does is call Lydia.

She and he have been friends since they met in preschool and he said he liked the color of her hair. They’ve also been bickering since she told him it was the color of the sun, and he insisted that the sun wasn’t really red, it was all colors, and she said prove it so he tried to climb some shelves to get at a book his mom had showed him and broke the shelves. And she got the book while he was in time-out and smugly told him the book picture showed the sun was all yellow and black, like a bumblebee.

Anyway. Lydia comes over and Stiles lays out what’s going on, and she critiques his analysis and they end up sneaking around the cemetery with a flashlight, looking for his dad. When they finally find him, he’s not anywhere near Stiles’ mom’s grave.

Where he is, is standing right over the grave of another woman, dead sober but holding an empty whiskey bottle, and Stiles is upset before his dad finally explains that this is the grave of the woman in the car accident, who’d told him to get to the hospital because she was going anyway. And who, as it turns out, also said something about being sorry that they weren’t going to be able to close the door once it was open. Except that was after she died. And she says the same lame bullshit to Stiles and Lydia about two seconds later, when she comes up to them.

So it turns out Stiles and his dad can now talk to ghosts.

Also, the ghosts talk back.

* * *

Somewhere around the fifth hour in, Ennis passes out and Stiles and Lydia decide they’ll give him that one. Stiles is starving and Derek is doing that thing where he pretends he’s okay but keeps suggesting places they could go and beat up people for information on the others they’re tracking down, and Lydia’s starting to give him _looks_.

They don’t go that far, just to the next room over, where Peter lays out the Chinese take-out he’s gone and gotten because he, at least, understands the purpose of regular downtime. Lydia chews him out for forgetting to have them take the peas out of her chicken fried rice, showing her approval of his forethought, and then they sit down to eat.

It’s kind of quiet, aside from the whispery noises leaking out from under the door, and Stiles thinks they’re actually doing okay right up till Erica pokes her container of sweet-and-sour chicken aside. “How the hell can you people eat?” she mutters, head resting on one hand, bloodshot eyes showing through the tangled curls falling over that hand. “Jesus. I mean—”

Derek raises his chopsticks, adjusts how his crossed ankles are propped up on a nearby trashcan, and then pops the potsticker into his mouth. “Werewolf,” he mumbles.

“Seconded,” Peter says. “Stiles, do you want any more of the tea?”

Erica jerks her hand out of her hair so it slaps against the table. “Yeah, so, _I’m_ a werewolf.”

“That man locked you and your best friend up for three months simply to make a point to your alpha. He deliberately drove you mad in order to use you as the pack version of a suicide bomber,” Lydia says crisply. “ _At best_ , he’s an abuser driven by megalomaniacal delusions. At worst, he’s contravened every single rule of werewolf society. Which, admittedly, are rather loose and prone to revision by individual alphas, but still—”

“Hey, look, I didn’t say I wanted us to stop,” Erica snaps. She rakes her hair out of her face, frowning at the table, and then grabs up her food like she might do something drastic with it. Then she just sighs and lowers it to her lap. “That asshole deserves every fucking thing he gets, and then some. I just—God, doesn’t it bother you? Watching it go down?”

Lydia winkles out another pea from her bowl and sets it next to the small pile on the lid of her container. She feeds herself pea-free rice and washes it down with a sip of Coke Zero. “No, but that’s why we’re professionals.”

“Look, you wanna talk to Boyd again?” Stiles finally says. When Erica looks up, so grateful that she almost looks as young as she is, he has a brief pang of regret. Then he sighs and he puts down his take-out container. “How about you just see what he says?”

“You already know what he says. I bet you were just waiting to slide that in and butter me up till I shut my mouth,” Erica says. She’s knowing, a little coyness in how she shifts back in her seat and gives Stiles extra lower lip in her grin, but her eyes are pretty grim over that. “You guys are one smooth operation, I’ll give you that. Could talk the dead right out of their graves.”

“More like the morgue, but hey, that’s modern embalming for you,” Stiles says, just as Derek looks up from his food, suspicious as hell. Then he sighs and puts his own food down, and gets serious. “Listen, you don’t have to stick around for this part, we explained that to you. If you want to get out for a little bit, clear your head, have a fling, that’s totally cool. I think Derek’s gotta make a supply run anyway, he can—”

Erica snorts and slouches more in her seat, so that her cleavage pushes up against her neckline, threatening to spill out. She’s canting herself towards both of them, though from the way Peter narrows his eyes at the back of her head, she’s not smelling it as much as she’s selling it. “I think Derek looks like he wants to kick us all out and get screwed with an audience of dead people.”

“It’s better than an audience of live people,” Derek says. He’s straightening his shoulders against the chair back, though he’s not pushing himself up. Showing a little teeth as he talks. “They shut up better.”

Peter makes some sort of meaningful noise—meaningful to Derek, anyway, who ticks his head, annoyed, without looking away from Erica—and crosses behind the table to duck down and drop his trash in the big, greasy paper bag all of the food came in. Then he steps a little farther, just drifting as he wipes his hands off, drifting and catching Lydia’s eye and temporarily united with her in exasperation.

“Yeah, okay, fine, let’s talk to Boyd,” Erica suddenly says. She slides a little further in her seat, then crosses her arms over her chest. That’s not flirting, though she accidentally squeezes up her bust more. “Whatever, it’s not like I don’t know what he’s already going to say. Just chill out, it’ll be okay, I’m so sorry I didn’t make it there too and take some of the load off you and you know what, fuck it, I don’t want to bother him. He’s probably getting his ear talked off by that asshole’s old pack, he’s got his own problems.”

Stiles raises his brows. “You sure?”

“Yeah,” Erica says. No longer even trying to be sarcastic. She takes her food and shoves it mechanically into her mouth till it’s half-gone, and then she shoves what’s left onto the table and gets up and goes into the hall.

The bathroom door, Stiles identifies, and then he gets up too. “My turn, right?” he says as he passes Lydia.

He doesn’t wait to see her nod. Does pause to drop his hand over Derek’s shoulder, even though Derek’s already getting up. The other man falls in behind him as they walk up the hall and push open the door and catch Erica hanging over the sink. She’s got her hands splayed on either side of the counter, her head hanging so low it’s almost between them, breathing hard. But the sink’s clean.

“You gotta remember we’ve been doing this a long time, too,” Stiles says, leaning against the doorway.

Derek hovers over his shoulder so he bats at him, then gets Derek by the arm and pulls down. The thump of Derek’s knees makes Erica’s shoulders jump, and she looks over just as Stiles slides his fingers into Derek’s hair, squeezing the thick strands between them. Her eyes flick werewolf-blue for a second, the same time that Derek buries his along with the rest of his face in Stiles’ hip.

“So you get used to it, right?” Erica mutters. She’s staring at Derek’s ass, which does stand out when he’s like that and in tight jeans and a wifebeater. Then she raises her eyes and gives Stiles a saucy little _hey_ smile that she’s not feeling. “Let me guess, you threw up your first time? Daddy hold your hand, tell you that you’d get over it?”

“Nah, actually, I thought it was cool shit and it got him worried and then Lyds and I got a lecture on remembering exactly why we do this,” Stiles says. He feels a little bit bad, seeing how Erica’s hands clench up against the counter, and shifts so that he’s more in the bathroom, can just put his hand on her shoulder. “I think what I’m trying to say is, we’ve lasted a long time not just because we’re good, but because we’re…we’re _good_ for this. You know what I’m saying?”

She nods, looking away. Not at the mirror, which is what Stiles would’ve picked, but down into the sink.

“I think I’m actually a pretty good werewolf,” she suddenly mutters. “You know, my alpha—she didn’t just pick me ‘cause of the epilepsy. I used to write all these stories in a notebook, like revenge stories, like I was gonna take out everybody on the way down.”

Stiles laughs. “Were they any good?”

“Nope,” Erica says. She lifts one hand and wipes it over her mouth, and then pulls half the hair back from her face, finally looking in the mirror. “This isn’t werewolf shit, what you guys do.”

“No kidding,” Stiles says. “That’s why we’re nemeses.”

“You’re such an asshole,” Erica says, turning around. She looks at Stiles, then at Derek, who senses it and twists his head just enough to look back, all dreamy-eyed, pushing into Stiles’ grip. “And I’d ask if he’s always been like this, but—”

“You wanna feel better about yourself or what?” Stiles says.

She looks up at him. Her hand is still in her hair and she seems to forget about it, because she pulls it too hard when she moves forward. Erica grimaces and shakes her fingers free, and then notices her bra’s a little rucked. She snorts and tugs it into place, shifting her shirt so that the bra’s edge peeps past the neckline for a second. “Fuck it, yeah, I do,” she says. “Three fucking _months_ , man. And you couldn’t do anything without those assholes watching and calling at you for it, couldn’t fucking do _anything_ —”

At that point her mouth comes down on his. Mostly. She’s either stumbling or not aiming, but anyway, Stiles drops his free arm around her waist and shifts her over and they go at each other pretty hard. She doesn’t bite, weirdly, but she uses her teeth like a battering ram, like she’s trying to crush each kiss to death. Her hands slide up his arms and then start pulling at his shirt.

Stiles backs off a little bit, not wanting that much of a mess when he’s got to go back soon, and Erica’s quick enough to catch on. She snorts, lets him mouth along her jaw—he doesn’t go for her neck—and reaches back to grab her shirt. Pauses while they suck each other’s tongues, and then lets out a surprisingly deep grunt and pushes her hands down farther.

She pulls up her skirt and drops her underwear, and he hooks a finger into her and curls another one against her clit before edging her against him, letting her hips rock while Derek nuzzles his way in. When Derek starts licking around the finger Stiles has in her, Erica swears and grabs Stiles’ shoulders.

Derek snarls. “Not gonna claw your boo, Hale,” Erica laughs, shaking, her breath pattering Stiles’ cheek like a broken shutter in the wind. She hitches herself up, gives Stiles’ cock a nice press with her thigh, and then drops as her arm swings to hook over the back of Stiles’ neck. “But fuck, do that one again.”

“It’s _amazing_ when he’s sucking you off,” Stiles tells her.

Erica gasps and levers herself against him, and then twists her head around so that they slam back against the jamb. Stiles can feel Derek putting his arms up and Erica’s weight slacks some without her moving, so Derek must be holding her up. Derek’s head is wedged between them, digging back into Stiles’ growing erection, and when Stiles lets out his first groan, Erica damn near bashes his head into the jamb trying to eat it out of his mouth.

It’s fast and hard and messy, and when she comes, Derek gets more spit on Stiles’ hand than licks off juices. Erica pants against Stiles’ shoulder, one hand absently massaging his chest, and then she starts moving that hand down.

“Nah, Derek’ll get me,” Stiles says.

She lifts her head and looks at him. “What, I can’t want to?”

“Well, yeah, you can, but Boyd is telling me some _sick_ shit, let me tell _you_ , if I screw this up,” Stiles says.

Erica’s face tightens up for a second. Then she pushes off him, pulls her skirt down. She looks rattled, angry, tired and bitter all in a couple seconds, and then she laughs. It’s too loose but it’s realer than the no-appetite shtick she was pulling at the table.

“He’s not even here, is he?” she says, giving Stiles an amused look. “He’s still back watching Ennis.”

Stiles shrugs. Her eyes narrow, but then she shrugs too. Steps into the bathroom to wash up, and then she grabs something from the medicine cabinet on the way out, which she slaps into Stiles’ hand.

“I’m gonna go find your girl, annoy her some more about her Prada,” she breathes, with a little kiss to Stiles’ cheek. “This was fun, but I don’t know about feeling better about _me_.”

“And Lyds is going to pin you eventually if you keep calling her that,” Stiles says after her. Then sighs, looking down at Derek. “Why do I even try?”

Derek shrugs. He’s got his fly open and his cock pulled out, and his jeans are halfway down his hips and sliding fast as he kneels up. “Well, don’t. Just—”

“Jesus, and _you_ ,” Stiles says, right before he grabs Derek by the neck, shoves him into the bathroom, down on his hands and knees. Takes the lube Erica passed him and smears it around Derek’s hole, just smears it, and then fucks it into Derek. “Like you don’t get up every day and thank your fucking _ass_ I try—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Derek moans, dropping to his elbows, and then so his head’s pressed flat to the floor. He’s not sarcastic, not in the least, voice rough and strung-out and dragging at Stiles like his hands can’t. “Yeah, shit, _yeah._ ”

So. Stiles feels better, anyway.

* * *

Talking to the dead. It’s great, right? Stiles’ dad is a cop and Stiles has an interest in solving mysteries, especially after it took way too long for the doctors to figure out what was wrong with his mother. And Lydia, well, her parents are starting to crack up and she’s too smart for her looks, she’s already getting double standards bullshit at school, and she could use a distraction. They are totally going to be the best cold-case solving team ever, catching murderers and freeing the innocent and bringing justice to California.

Yeah. Right.

Dead people. They want a lot of stuff. They do want their killers to be caught, but also, they want revenge. They’re pretty damn bloodthirsty, you know, what with being stuck and having nothing to do but watch the people who screwed them over getting away with it, and also, all the other living people who are walking around not knowing anything and just living life and chilling and yeah. So. They’re angry.

Stiles’ dad does get some cases closed. Dead people are, well, _dead_. They can’t really do that much to you, once you get over the first shock, and that’s why they bug the few people who can sense them in the first place. It’s not as great as Stiles was thinking but it’s sort of working, a little.

It’s just then some of the dead start talking more. Not just telling them who did it, but also what was done, and hey, by the way, you know there’s this whole supernatural underground, right? And most of the people in it are vicious psychopaths who aren’t just killing for regular things like money or fear or anger, they’re doing crap like elaborate virgin murders for power. And the other supernaturally-enabled people, druids and whatever, they know about it, but they keep it all quiet just because reasons, which are more important than people.

So Stiles’ dad gets into a fight with the local, highly-respected vet and the vet’s sister, and ends up having to resign his post because fistfights are unbecoming even if the vet’s sister has illegal military-grade tasers. Also around then, Lydia starts to realize she can also hear the dead, except that her deal seems to be a little bit different. And thanks to that stupid vet’s sister—because she and Stiles are not stupid and have been very careful about keeping everything under wraps—her parents find out and decide she’s crazy and decide to commit her to an insane asylum for non-FDA-approved treatment.

She overhears, because the ghosts hear, and runs over to Stiles’ house and she and Stiles beg Stiles’ father to do something and in the middle of _all_ of that, some fucking ghost shows up to demand that they drive to Nevada and take out his murdering son-in-law.

They’re kind of busy, but he keeps pestering them and then he drops that he’s got a bank account that the son doesn’t know about. And a good lawyer, who will do whatever they need if they mention certain loans the dead guy made way back when. Stiles’ dad is going to tell him off anyway, Stiles can tell, but then his dad gets a look on his face and asks about the lawyer again.

Stiles gets it, and grabs Lydia’s hand, and his father looks down at the two of them and gets _another_ look on his face, like Stiles hasn’t seen since his mother died in front of them.

So that is officially the first time they do this as a _job_.

For the longest time Stiles thinks that his dad thought it was his crush on Lydia, and not wanting to let him down, and not having any legal way to fix it. Which was fair enough, considering that’s what Stiles thought too. But right before his dad literally put himself out to the farm, Stiles got him aside for long enough and he explained that it wasn’t that, it was just knowing what was going on wasn’t the real story, and at the same time _knowing_ the real story. And knowing that even if he put people in jail, got them convicted, it’d never be for _all_ the things they did, because those things, only the dead and he and Stiles and Lydia know about.

It was about realizing why those ghosts were so angry, his dad had said, that and then seeing that hell, he was angry too, for the same reason. And realizing that there was no way he was ever going to get rid of that anger if he just kept on doing what he was doing. Like the woman had said, his dad had reminded him, you can’t shut the door again.

So, it’d occurred to his dad, they might as well stop trying.

* * *

Ennis’ old pack finally winds their stuff down, the spirits winking out one by one with a last spit at his cowering form. Stiles is on-duty and he finishes up his current game on his phone, then calls Lydia.

She shows up a few minutes later, Erica in tow. Erica’s dressed for sleep, in a loose t-shirt and pajama pants, but she rolls up the pants legs and ties her hair back, and then sits down just at the edge of the ring. She’s trembling a little bit, for the minute and a half it takes for Ennis to realize she’s there and twist himself around to look at him, and then she goes still.

He blinks a few times. His eyes are crusted up with blood where he’s tried to bang his head against the floor, but his alpha healing can keep up with that. “You,” he rasps after a little bit. “I remember you. You’re the little one who got out.”

Lydia’s busy helping Stiles. She cuts the back of her hand and lets the blood drip into the center of the sigil Stiles has chalked on the floor behind Erica, and then she bandages that up and grabs the matches.

“Yeah, me,” Erica says, so low she’s almost mumbling. She pulls her hair back from her face. “And Boyd. You remember him too, right?”

Ennis’ eyes flick past her to the shape that’s slowly coming together over the sigil. His eyes widen—blood flakes off from their corners—and he pushes himself back, crawling till he hits the far side of the circle. He’s got bloody patches all over him, from where he’s banged or clawed himself. A couple singed spots where they had to tase him when he got too active and could’ve killed himself before they were done. Inside the ring there are spots of dried blood and dried piss and still-sticky vomit, and he smears all of that as he crawls.

“Deucalion ordered it,” he says, shaking his head.

“Oh, yeah, whatever, so you just went ahead and did it,” Erica mutters. “What the hell happened to all that stuff about a pack of equals, you’re all alphas? If you’d really been a goddamn alpha, you would have _fought_ for your _pack_.”

A whine escapes from Ennis at the word ‘pack’ and he twists down on himself, pulling one arm over his head. Erica laughs harshly, while the ghost of her friend tugs a little, detaches from the sigil, and then glides up to loom over her shoulder.

“Peter thinks he’s got wind of Kali, did he tell you?” Lydia says to Stiles. “He was supposed to.”

Stiles thinks. “He may have said something like that, right before I tied him up and told him to rim Derek till I got back.”

Lydia looks at him.

“They were being really annoying and asking about Dad,” Stiles says, shrugging. “I told them, obviously he’s okay if he’s calling ahead, so if they try and poke around the farm before he talks to us, he’s gonna shoot them and I’m not gonna block it.”

“Speaking of, he texted me again,” Lydia says, after a moment’s annoyed staring. She crosses her arms over her chest and steps forward so that she and Stiles are bending their heads together. “He wanted a double room booked for him.”

Stiles hums. “Totally got laid.”

She’s disappointed in him. He knows, and he’s amused, and then they both jerk around as Erica snarls. She’s still outside the circle, but she’s jabbing her finger pretty wildly at Ennis. And he’s still on the other side of the circle, but he’s looking a little less shaky.

Lydia sighs. “This is why we don’t deal with the living,” she mutters under her breath.

Still, she watches as Erica screams at Ennis that they mattered, that they weren’t just some goddamn betas, that alphas are just jumped-up shits who get theirs and look at him now, right? And as she yells, she pushes back to stand up, edging away from the ash circle, and Boyd’s ghost enfolds her like a cape. He seems to steady her and her breathing slows, and she even smiles a little as she tells Ennis that she’s going to love every minute of watching him die.

“Dunno, she seems like she’s picking it up,” Stiles says under his breath. “I mean, cut her some slack, Lyds, she’s only been with us less than a week.”

Lydia rolls her eyes sideways to glance at him. Then she sniffs and pulls out her phone without crossing her arms. “Do you think we should’ve branched out earlier?” she says while looking at it.

That’s not really what she’s asking. She’s asking whether she fucked up with Stiles’ dad, whether she somehow wasn’t around enough, despite her being adopted by them in all but name and legal paperwork. Stiles grimaces to himself and thinks for a second that he’d rather be dealing with Peter and Derek, and then calls himself on that and just shoves his hands in his pockets. Boyd’s materialized enough to be hissing at Ennis now, while Erica gets some hiccups under control, and Ennis is starting to look like he realizes it’s never getting any better.

“I mean, Derek and Peter, and that didn’t exactly do anything,” Stiles finally says.

“Your dad wasn’t the one fucking those two,” Lydia says tartly. She redos her calendar.

“I mean,” Stiles starts again. He knew he shouldn’t have started out softshoeing it, but well, it’s Lydia, she’s known him and his father longer than anybody and she judges everybody on everything but she’s never, ever judged them about what they do. He always makes that mistake because she never makes it. “I don’t think he was just lonely, you know. He always—always kind of, well, wanted to do it like he was taught. Like it can be fair.”

She doesn’t look over, but her thumb hesitates over her phone. Then she taps down, saves the new entry, puts her phone away and looks up at Erica and Boyd and Ennis.

“He just used to be a cop,” Stiles says, faltering even as he does. “It’s just what he knew first, you remember that.”

“Well, that’s not his fault, I suppose,” Lydia says.

She goes over to the circle, pulling out her gun as she does. When Stiles turns to go, she’s handing it to Erica and explaining that the bullets have graduated doses of wolfsbane in them. Boyd’s standing next to them, flickering in and out as his ghost bares its fangs at Ennis.

Stiles heads back down the hall and into his bedroom. He gets about a yard in and then looks at the bed and—okay, so he kind of forgot. It happens.

Then he shrugs and walks over and drags Peter’s face out of Derek’s buttocks, and then fucks into him while Peter’s still whining pitifully. Peter seizes up, twisting his hands where they’re cuffed behind him, then struggles to dig his knees into the sheets, trying to brace himself as Stiles plows his ass. At the headboard, Derek pants and hangs from the chains pulling his arms to either bedpost.

“Hey, so, Peter said something about Kali, right?” Stiles grunts.

“Heard from pack we used to ally with,” Derek grunts back. He arches his back, pushing his ass up so that Stiles can see the flushed cock hanging between his legs. “She’s been by, said she and Deucalion aren’t together anymore.”

Stiles grins at it, then reaches up and gets a fistful of Peter’s hair. He pulls the man’s head back till Peter is screwing himself on Stiles’ cock, trying to relieve the strain, and then lets it drop. Works himself onto the bed, on top of Peter, and reaches out to push Peter’s leg so the man flattens. Peter groans as he goes down, movements shifting from back and forth to a frantic side-to-side, until Stiles gets him by the hips and pins him. Then he just shudders and whimpers.

They’ve slid so that Peter’s head is between Derek’s legs and Derek’s cock head drags over Peter’s hair a few times. Peter seems to feel it, twists his head trying to get away, but then Stiles digs under him and unsnaps the cock ring and Peter’s got other things on his mind. Which is why he doesn’t move when Stiles pulls the hand out from under him, jams two fingers into Derek’s hole, and then holds them there as Derek flexes and rattles the chains and comes all over his hair.

His ass does clench down, right at the tail-end of his climax, and it’s good and tight and hot and Stiles grabs the back of Peter’s shoulder, swaying. Then flicks his fingers out of Derek and gets hold of Peter’s other shoulder and relaxes into Peter, coming with a nice, pleasantly loose shiver.

“Good,” he mutters into Peter’s back. “I don’t want Dad to have to bother with the cannon fodder if we can help it.”

Derek shifts and Stiles looks up, but the man’s just tugging at the chains. Peter’s too quiet under him, even with the ragged breathing, but neither of them are saying anything. Guess they’re not the only ones learning, Stiles thinks, and then he gets out of Peter and gets the keys.

* * *

Lydia’s parents stop being a problem, and Lydia gets emancipated and then they all move away. Town’s never been the same since Stiles’ mom died anyway. 

There’s an old Greek term for what they do: nemesis. Those who carry out the vengeance of the dead. It’s fancy and comes with a lot of loaded traditions and a code that still has relics such as taking care of certain types of sinners only in certain months, and they don’t do any of that shit.

They have standards. Stiles’ dad doesn’t start out just flipping from upstanding law enforcement officer to mercenary for ghosts, and he does his best to bring up Stiles and Lydia with a sense of…of restraint. It’s hard to talk about right and wrong here, but he still sort of believes in some of that stuff, too.

It’s just when you talk a lot with dead people, you sort of realize that the dead are wronged but the dead are also still not that much nicer than the living. Actually, they’re not any nicer. And just because Stiles and his dad and Lydia are helping out people who have gotten screwed over doesn’t mean that they’re going to be left alone. They have to learn to defend themselves from all kinds, not just the ones they’re going after, and not just the living. A sense of right and wrong turns out to be kind of useless, from a practical perspective.

So it’s morally and philosophically complicated, but for Stiles and Lydia, it basically comes down to: they think they should be doing this, so they’re going to figure out how to do it. After that they’ll work out the nuances.

For Stiles’ dad, it’s not quite so streamlined. He never touches a drop of alcohol after that time they found him standing over the woman’s grave, but he gets uncomfortable. Sometimes he wonders aloud whether they’ll have dead coming after them, as if he doesn’t know that Stiles and Lydia have extensively researched that and they don’t regularly do cleansing and exorcism ceremonies. 

They try to make it easier on him, to tamp down on their preferred methods in front of him, but hey, they’re growing up and it just gets frustrating sometimes, not being able to do things the safest, most efficient, most _sensible_ way. That was how Derek came in, basically—Stiles needed a break and went off and did a solo, like the idiot teenager he stupidly thought he was too cynical to be at the time.

And he used to wonder why his father worried about them. Jesus.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So in this universe, Scott and Stiles were never friends. Lydia filled the Scott position in Stiles' life.


	2. Chapter 2

“So what do you do with the bodies?” Erica asks.

Kali’s been spotted fifty miles from where they holed up with Ennis, and she’s reportedly heading over to the Sacramento area. With the Alpha pack split up, and no sane pack about to tolerate a former member of it near them, the cities are about the only place she’d be able to stay more than a few days in the same place.

It’s also a lot easier to drive out from Sacramento to find her, rather than zigzag all over the backwoods. Peter and Lydia drove ahead to do things like warn off the local druids, find somewhere they can call up a bunch of ghosts to torture an alpha in peace, that sort of thing. Stiles stayed back with Derek to clean up; they offered to let Erica ride with Peter and Lydia, but she refused, even though she knows part of the deal is she doesn’t get the bodies. 

“I’m not going to backtrack and dig him up, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she says, following Stiles’ train of thought. “I’m just curious. Isn’t that a real pain for you, getting rid of them?”

“It’s called part of the job,” Derek mutters.

He’s driving. He doesn’t exactly insist, but he has this way of glowering from the backseat that’s louder and more annoying than any little kid kicking the back and asking whether they’re there yet. For that brief stretch when it was him and Stiles and Lydia and Stiles’ dad, Stiles’ dad would drive anyway, and then Stiles would end up sneaking a hand across the seat to try and distract Derek. And not that Derek was averse to that, but Lydia would always clear her throat at a bad time and Stiles’ dad—Stiles’ dad was feeling awkward enough, and refusing to talk about it.

Anyway, Stiles usually has stuff to take care of and Derek’s a decent driver when they aren’t having an emergency, or he isn’t annoyed, or the first two plus other people don’t know how to change lanes. Derek’s a werewolf, it’d be suspicious if he _didn’t_ have rage issues.

“Why do you want to know?” Stiles says, catching that miffed look of Erica’s in the rearview mirror. “And no, I’m not stalling. I want to know. You’re on a mission of vengeance, you know.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I want to know because I want to know that asshole didn’t get some awesome burial with a wolfsbane spiral and a decapitated body and all that showy traditional stuff,” Erica says. She’s smiling at him via the rearview mirror, but she’s talking like her voice is a stiletto she’s waving around, hoping to get shot. “Maybe I think that bastard just deserves to be forgotten. Him and his crazy cult leader, and all that apocalyptic bullshit about showing us the true way and fuck him.”

Stiles filters his spreadsheet, and then cross-checks with the one Lydia emailed him. Or tries to—he’s using his phone for a hotspot but reception’s spotty—till finally his email refreshes and he gives up and saves locally. He’s going to have to clean out a bunch of memory when they get to their hotel; doing the work of ghosts doesn’t actually cut down on the amount of investigative work they have to do. 

“Yeah, what I mean,” Stiles says. He senses more than hears Erica’s protest starting up. “Vengeance, not OCD. He didn’t get full honors, let’s leave it at that.”

“Well, maybe I. Don’t. Want. To,” Erica grates.

Derek snarls. When Stiles looks over, he finds that the other man hasn’t even straightened up for it, hasn’t so much as tipped down his sunglasses. No, Derek’s still slouched behind the wheel, tucked into the James Dean beaten leather and shiny shades, even if he’s got his claws out and hanging loose over the wheel.

“Oh, fuck you too,” Erica mutters, though she sounds like she’s moving over, more behind Stiles’ seat. “You’re all a bunch of hypocrites, you born wolves. You’re all, well, you’re a bitten, you’re stupid, you have no idea how this works, but the moment things don’t go your way, you start going fuck the rules just like we do.”

They hit a long, straight stretch of road between two sets of hills, just them and a lumber truck, which isn’t ambling but which certainly isn’t going as fast as it could, and it’s a two-lane highway.

Derek punches the accelerator, and as they’re swerving around the truck, he swerves around the side of his seat, grinning at Erica. “Did I say that?”

To her credit, she’s staring at him, not at the road. That changes when Derek slides back into the right lane and the truck blasts its horn, her eyes flicking out through the windshield, but she keeps her hands where Stiles can’t tell whether they’re shaking or not.

“You do Greek myths in school?” Stiles says.

“What?” Erica half-asks, half-laughs. She shakes her head, leaving her hand against the side of her face a second longer than she needs to for pushing her hair away. “Oh. Yeah. I knew all of those, was a real nerd. Nothing to do but read up about dead people’s dead beliefs when you’re always in and out of the hospital.”

“So Odyssey,” Stiles says, ignoring that obvious ploy. “The part where they’re gonna talk to the dead.”

Erica’s silent for a little bit. He thinks she’s confused for sure, and maybe sullen enough to just give up out of pique. Smart enough to realize she’s not going to win the battle, let alone the war. Whatever, anyway, he thinks she’s going to shut up.

“They went for blood,” she mutters, when they’re almost out of the valley. “Vampires.”

“Nah, just, you need a little connection back to the living to bridge the gap, right? Little quid pro quo, it takes a lot of energy to break through,” Stiles says without thinking. He’s deep into prep work and it wasn’t that long ago that Peter was still asking questions—because Peter just enjoys _knowing_ , information vampire if they’re going to talk about that—and Stiles just likes explaining and doesn’t get a lot of chances at it. “Blood’s easy. It’s like the Red Bull of spirit communing, okay, it’s a lot easier than having a real personal connection.”

“Yeah. Yeah, well, so what do you do with the rest of it?” Erica says impatiently. “If it’s just the—”

“I didn’t say it was the blood, I just said it’s like in the Odyssey. You call up the dead and they gotta be paid, one way or the other,” Stiles says, typing. “And sure, Ennis was a big guy, but a little bit spread over a lot of dead. It adds up. Or subtracts out, as it happens, and just blood isn’t enough, and after that there’s honestly not that much you have to get rid of. You know?”

Erica doesn’t say anything. It drags on for a while, her not saying anything, and then Stiles gets absorbed in what he’s doing and reception gets better and Peter calls to ask whether they need to factor Stiles’ father in for Kali or not. Stiles asks why Peter doesn’t just talk to Lydia, since Stiles’ dad is texting all the logistics to her, apparently, and Peter does that charming bluster of his where he’s trying to weasel a couple things through cracks he sees—or thinks he sees, or just thinks should be there—and Derek pretends like he’s not eavesdropping. It’s cute and annoying and finally Stiles emails Lydia and Peter gets cut off mid-sentence.

“Is he okay?” Erica says about two minutes later.

Derek laughs. Stiles wonders why the hell the price of nightshade is up when it’s in season, and then belatedly gets around to answering her. “He’s gonna be very pleased you were worried about him, is what he is.”

“Oh, my God, so not my fucking type,” Erica mutters.

That’s the end of conversation till they pull into their hotel about half an hour later. It’s still early afternoon, they could make it all the way to Sacramento if they wanted to, but Stiles is getting sleepy and Derek’s probably going to add hangry to his list of rage problems if they don’t feed that speedy metabolism of his. Anyway, they show up early, they’re just going to be sitting on their asses watching Lydia work and getting her irritated.

“…worn out?” Stiles hears Erica saying, as he curls up on top of one of the double queens.

“He’s fine,” Derek says curtly.

Erica snorts. “Hey, I’m not horning in, I’m just asking. I paid for all of them, I want to know he’s gonna get me there.”

“You paid for a seat on the ride,” Derek drawls, sounding almost like Peter for a second. “This isn’t some territorial pissing contest. That’s why you and I aren’t taking this out back.”

“Oh, big boy, you liked it that much when I sat on your face?” Erica says.

Derek laughs. The door slams, and then footsteps come to the bed. The side closest to Stiles dips. “Stop being an asshole to her for two seconds, would you?” Stiles mutters.

The dip freezes where it is. “I’m not being an asshole,” Derek finally says. “This is me being nice.”

“Yeah, sure,” Stiles says, but he rolls onto his back. Doesn’t open his eyes, just feels it as Derek slides up next to him, hair roughing up the underside of his chin, jaw pressing down on his chest, hands curled up like a kid against Stiles’ side. Till Stiles sighs and reaches down and folds his fingers across the back of Derek’s neck.

Derek lets out a long, low exhale, like he’s dropping for the day and not just for a couple minutes while room service makes it up. His hand sneaks up Stiles’ hip, and when Stiles doesn’t deter that, cautiously splays over Stiles’ belly. It’s not possessive; it’s like a pet pushing its paws out to touch, just making sure it’s all real.

“You okay?” Derek mumbles.

“You know, she’s probably traumatized as hell,” Stiles says. “Locked up, watched her best friend die trying to get out, then got out just in time to see the rest of her pack get slaughtered. And it’s not like she got grief counseling afterward.”

“Druid was a psychologist,” Derek says. “Her record. You said.”

“Yeah, but she’s a druid. I mean, it’s not like they respect patient confidentiality,” Stiles says. He opens his eyes, then closes them almost immediately, feeling that burn at the edges when you’re really exhausted. But he’s just not tired enough, fatigued without that loss of tension. It’s irritating and for a second he wishes—and then he hates himself a little bit. “Dad says he’s coming back. He’s not just visiting.”

Derek’s all tense against him, too, which doesn’t help. It’s like cuddling a coiled spring and that’s only attractive to Transformers and maybe rust-eating bacteria.

“Are you going to make me and Peter go?” Derek suddenly says.

It’s so muffled into Stiles’ chest that at first he can’t make it out. He’s even pushing himself up on his arm, eyes dragging open, mouth shaping up to ask Derek to repeat that, and then he gets the words in his ear, floated in on a chilly breeze in the middle of a room with shitty A/C. Fucking know-it-all ghosts.

“What would that do?” Stiles says, looking down at Derek.

Or more accurately, at the top of Derek’s head. Derek jerks his shoulders down, locks them stiffly in place, and then slowly twists over so that they’re looking at each other. He’s got a scowl like if he punched his head into a concrete block, the block would end up with a perfect intaglio replica of his face, and then he comes up with eyes like that, big liquid dark things, like a bunch of high-flown metaphors about the beauty of uncertainty.

Ambiguity, sure, Stiles agrees with. But uncertainty just makes everybody uncomfortable. “For the last time, it wasn’t you,” he says, flopping back down. He stares at the ceiling while Derek, propped up on his arms, stares down at him. “Also, I swear, if either of you pull this shit when my dad’s around, I will—”

“Okay. Okay,” Derek mutters, shifting down to lay his head on Stiles’ belly. He’s not apologizing so much as groveling, so sorry that his werewolf instincts won’t even let him take that much of an affirmative step.

“Jesus,” Stiles says.

When he puts his hand back on Derek, several minutes later, Derek shudders so hard that it almost gets knocked off. Stiles snaps his fingers down around Derek’s shoulder, holding on, and then bends his other arm up to pillow under his head. He really, really needs that nap. He guesses he should just be grateful Derek’s come along enough to know to not try and blow him into falling asleep, not like when he’s like this.

* * *

Derek Hale. Werewolf. Big fucking deal in werewolf circles, both for his famous mom and for his family’s infamous end, nearly all of them going down in a peace meeting gone wrong with some hunters, boiled alive by steam in one of those factory death-traps that’s only supposed to be a photogenic final showdown set in the movies. It later came out that the whole thing resulted out of a bunch of double-crosses and honeypot lures and at least one druid falling asleep on the blatant-lies-o-meter, so you’d think they’d meet up the way Stiles usually meets people like that, via business.

Ghosts sometimes bring along living people. It’s rare, since the kind of spirit who still has that sort of attachment to the living usually isn’t in the right mindset for no-holds-barred, let’s hire the professionals revenge. But it happens. Lydia actually prefers to pick her sex partners exclusively from that subset of the population, since as she puts it, she already knows what they’ve been up to, and when they sober up and realize what they’ve done, that saves her the trouble of convincing them to never call her again.

It’d make sense, but that’s not how Stiles meets Derek. Stiles meets Derek because he slipped up and got caught by some hunters who also killed a pregnant werewolf six months back, and _she_ is looking to go after them. Stiles’ father and Lydia are busy working through a really complicated request for a dead druid (hey, living ones are annoying, but dead ones are dead and they don’t screen just based on your old job), who wants the targets financially destroyed first, and Stiles is burned out from the job before that so they say sure, go on vacation.

He doesn’t go on vacation. He ends up standing in the middle of the predictable cellar from hell, picking through torture implements and bloodstains, killing time while his client drives the hunters insane on the first floor, and finds himself looking at a really, really, ridiculously good-looking corpse.

Yeah, so Derek bit it before they got there. He’s still chained to a post in the middle of the cellar, wires going from him to the powerbox in the corner, and what happened was he got hit with a surge when Stiles was storming the house and if you jack up the power high enough, even werewolf hearts give out. 

It’s not exactly Stiles’ fault, but once Stiles gets the wires safely off, he can’t help thinking that that just fucking takes the cake. Fucking hunters, and man, when Stiles’ dad hears—

Derek’s still warm. That’s how long he’s been dead, he’s still warm when Stiles rocks up his chin, stares down into his unseeing eyes, and Stiles doesn’t think, just brings his other hand around to cup Derek’s head between his fingers and upstairs a hunter dies out of sheer fright.

The eyes he’s staring out suddenly clear, and the head he’s cradling jerks back as the chest underneath heaves. Chains rattle and Derek sways off the post, almost falling into Stiles’ chest before Stiles grabs his shoulders and shoves him back up. Derek blinks at him, panting, and Stiles carefully lets go of him and then steps back.

“Hi,” Stiles says. “I’m Stiles. I’m in the middle of killing the guys who run this place, and I need to go check on that, so just hold that thought.”

Then Stiles runs upstairs and asks way too loudly whether the ghost is done yet. She’s not, and she’s not happy about being interrupted, and no, he’s not rushing her, all right, he’s just kind of…whatever, fine, just do her thing. 

She gives him a really funny look, almost like he’s making her sad, and then suddenly, just like that, she winks out. “I’m done,” her disembodied voice says.

Stiles stands there and looks at the weeping hunters. Gives himself a shake, shrugs, and sets about the conclusion.

He’s wiping off his hands when he realizes he’s got an audience. Derek’s crouching at the edge of the room, broken chains dangling from his wrists, blood dried all over one side of his face and in splotches across his bare chest—which does not look any less attractive that way—jeans ripped and scuffed to the point that they’re basically just covering his crotch. Stiles stops and Derek blinks hard and tilts his head.

“I’m Derek,” he says. “Are you burying them?”

“Uh, no, it’s a little more zero-waste than that,” Stiles says, stepping back. “Um, you…probably don’t want to look. You seem like you’ve looked plenty lately, I mean.”

Derek looks at him funny, not like Stiles is making him sad, just like Stiles doesn’t make sense, and deliberately settles in place.

Stiles doesn’t know what to do with that so he goes in the kitchen and calls Lydia. Luckily, he catches her when she’s nowhere near his dad. She chews him out for about a minute and then makes him recap in detail and then tells him she’ll get down there in thirty-six hours so keep his ass and this Derek whatever’s ass out of jail. Also that he should eat and shower and sleep, in exactly that order.

When Stiles hangs up, the business in the living room is done and Derek is standing in the kitchen with him. “So, you heard all that, right?” Stiles asks.

Derek nods. He’s getting some paper towels wet, and then using them to wipe off his face. He looks like he’s healed, now that he’s not a human fuse, but he’s moving pretty stiffly and it is doing things to that impressive musculature and he sniffs pointedly right then, like Stiles wasn’t already aware of how totally inappropriate this is.

“You down?” Stiles says.

“Sure,” Derek says, mopping at some blood under his neck.

“Really?” Stiles says. “I mean, really, like you got nobody to check in on, or anywhere that’s more important to be than the ol’ suburban Star Chamber, or—”

Derek takes away the towels and lowers his chin and looks at Stiles, and for all that he’s taller and way, way more built, he suddenly seems to fold up, go brittle, look like all Stiles has to do is put out a finger and flick and send him flying. “Do you want me to go?” he says.

“Oh, my God,” Stiles says, because the puppy eyes on Derek are just as irritatingly effective back then, and make him do just as many stupid things out of sheer exasperation. “Do not make this into some abandonment novel, and why the hell does the dog always die anyway?”

Derek is confused, but doesn’t say anything, just looks like it.

“Oh, come on, I gotta burn the place now,” Stiles says, and stalks out. He’s barely to the door when Derek’s caught up and is at his heels, and Derek’s been there pretty much ever since.

* * *

Stiles does end up napping a little bit, badly, and when he finally rolls over, Erica is sitting cross-legged on the other bed with a half-eaten empanada in her hand and a bag of them on the dresser between the beds.

“Derek went to go get you a soda,” she says. “Also, since he took his bag with him, I’m guessing he’s fucking up somebody.”

“He’s talking to the locals,” Stiles says. He gets off the bed and she leans over and grabs the bag of food, offering it to him. So he takes an empanada and then he goes over and digs in his bag till he gets out his spare set of clothes. “Sometimes they get in the way. We’d really like for them not to, we ask nicely and respect the territory besides, y’know, our business, but—”

“Why would they?” Erica says, frowning. “It’s a vendetta. Also, it’s not about them at all, so why do they care?”

Stiles polishes off the empanada between the bed and the bathroom door. “Well, druids,” he says. “Also, irrationally territorial alphas, you know the deal.”

He takes a quick shower and then rubs down with a towel, scrubbing extra-hard at his hair. It’s getting a little longer than he likes and he hopes that they’ll wrap the Alpha pack in time for him to get it cut before it starts looking like they’ll need a weedwhacker, in Lydia’s words. Then he leans forward over the sink, peering at his cheeks in the mirror. They’re smooth, hairless, looking like a good year or two yet from needing a shave even though he doesn’t need to fake his age on his driver’s license anymore.

Derek’s back when Stiles goes out into the other room. He doesn’t look too messy, and he managed to find Stiles a prickly pear soda, for which Stiles grins and drags him into a kiss by the hair at the back of his head, so he moans a little into Stiles’ mouth.

“So, druids?” Erica says. When they look over at her, she’s got her shoulders propped against the headboard and her legs crossed, lounging and looking right back at them with a big smile. “Show’s nice, and trust me, any other time, I would be _all_ over that, but…”

“Not in the mood to feel better?” Derek says.

She looks at him, then laughs. “You do the asshole thing way better, stick to what works for you,” she says. Her voice starts dragging near the end and she looks away as Stiles takes his soda and Derek and walks both to the other bed, sitting down on the edge nearest to her. “I don’t know. Call me crazy, but I’m just not getting the whole sex part of the sex and death tour.”

“Yeah, well,” Stiles says, and then opens his soda before he can be so patronizing even he can’t stand it. “Druids—some druids, they think a nemesis is basically a necromancer.”

Erica pops a claw and examines it like anybody else would a manicure. “I thought necromancers bring _bodies_ back to life.”

“You can get technical about it, I guess, but there’s overlap,” Stiles says, while Derek crawls behind him and then gets down and curls up that way, head and knees pressing into opposite hips of Stiles’. “I think it’s more of a general philosophy that the dead should stay with the dead, and the living with the living, and never the two shall meet. Mix. Whatever. Also, we can do a shitload of stuff that they can’t, not without going over to the Dark Side and hitting the darach button.”

“Darach?” Erica says.

“Evil, unstable, between Lydia and me and my dad we’ve actually only ever done one because usually they end up going so crazy they blow themselves up, only with magic instead of explosives,” Stiles explains.

Erica nods absently, and then scoots down so that only her head is leaning against the top of the bed. “So, I was gonna catch up on sleep, except I was dozing and I dreamed about Boyd again.”

“He’s saying it wasn’t him,” Stiles says automatically.

She jerks her head over, angrily enough that Derek rolls his weight into better crouching position, easy and liquid and predatory enough to get Erica to flick her eyes his way. Her lips pull back and her teeth lengthen, but before they’re true fangs, she abruptly rolls back over to stare at the far wall.

“Yeah, I knew that, he got—I guess I got upset enough, and I took a shower and he left me a message on the mirror.” Erica laughs a little shrilly. “I sound like a bad stalker story and hey, Boyd, it’s not you, okay?”

“You’ll feel better,” Stiles says.

She looks at him again. “Lydia always says I’ll feel better when we kill them,” she says. “You not gonna go there?”

“Look, what are you getting at?” Stiles snaps, suddenly feeling his fatigue. “You want us to act like we get bothered by this?”

“No, Jesus, I _paid_ you, I’m not that much of a hypocrite,” Erica says. She fidgets a little, and then she gets up. “I’m gonna take a walk. Derek beat up anybody who’s gonna grab me, right?”

“Wouldn’t push it past a couple miles,” Derek mutters. He pauses and slides his head under the hand Stiles puts down. “I was going to the quickie mart, I wasn’t doing the town tour.”

“Okay, sure, got it,” Erica says, with a flap of her hand behind her.

She walks out and Stiles sighs and eats another couple empanadas. Halfway through his third, he realizes that the bag has little hot sauce containers and he just—he puts it on the half he still has and it’s homemade and awesome and he’d loved to slather it over more but he’s full now. And he’s all messed-up, he knows that, but just messing up on this sort of level. That’s just insulting.

He tosses the bag onto the dresser and then flops onto his back.

“Hey,” Derek says.

Stiles pushes himself up on his elbows. Derek swung his legs out of the way when Stiles went down, so now they’re lying in opposite directions and Derek still has his shoes on. “Get those off,” Stiles says, looking at them.

Derek stares right at Stiles, unblinking, and eels down till his feet are hanging over the edge. He toes them off, then contorts himself around to pull off his socks and toss those down, too, without having to break eye contact. Stiles does that, looking at the bottom of Derek’s shirt, and Derek puts his hand down and peels that up his belly. Stops and wraps the cloth around his hand, and then peels it the rest of the way off.

He unfolds himself to drop that over the edge of the bed and Stiles reaches out and puts his palm flat on Derek’s back, right in the center. Feels the muscles under it jump and flex, feels a little bit of sweat sticking their skin together. Then he gives Derek a push and Derek twists himself around to face the headboard, on his hands and his knees. Stays that way, head down, arms and thighs trembling, as Stiles gets up behind him and pulls his jeans off.

Erica might be out for a while, or she might just be taking a walk around the hotel and coming straight back, in which case she’s probably coming in any second. Stiles thinks about it and doesn’t care, and gets lube from his bag and then slicks up all his fingers and his thumb, and then his palm and the back of his hand.

Maybe he overdoes it. Dollops slip off to stain the duvet as he works his fingers into Derek, scissoring them till the other man drops to grind the top of his head into his crossed forearms. Derek’s always tight, got to love that werewolf healing, but Stiles probably could’ve gotten up to four fingers with half as much.

And then he works in his thumb and Derek lets out a stuttering groan, his thighs shaking so much that he might actually slip for a half-second, Stiles isn’t sure because it’s such a quick jerk back up and then Derek sucks his breath and shoves back and all that lube’s a good thing when Derek’s stretched rim lips over Stiles’ knuckles and then those slide down the inside of the man’s ass, slow, aching in a way that they both feel. 

Stiles is short of breath, he realizes, getting up on his knees, putting his other hand on Derek’s buttock to steady himself. “Holy fuck,” he’s muttering. “Holy actual fuck, I love how you just fucking take that up, just like you’re fucking _made_ for it, your pretty werewolf ass.”

“Shit,” Derek grunts. His knees are rocking from side to side. “Stiles. Shit.”

“Yeah,” Stiles says, speechless for once.

He twists his hand a little and Derek starts to sag the opposite way. Twists them that way, and Derek jerks like he was electrocuted and that should be such a turn-off, God, Stiles shouldn’t be that fucked up, his dad loved him and tried hard to bring him up with everything he’d need, but Stiles gets his hand out of there. Gets it out and yanks open his pants and has his cock in Derek before Derek’s even finished crying out from being emptied in the first place.

“Goddamn it,” he’s saying, hands glued to Derek’s hips, pistoning so that they slide over the bed and Derek flashes his claws in and out and then doesn’t rip up the bed, good werewolf, just jams his forearm out to keep them from smashing into the headboard. “Goddamn, made for it, I fucking made that, I brought you back and you fucking looked up like you wanted to deepthroat my fucking cock right then and there—”

“Yeah, I know, fuck, _yes_ ,” Derek hisses back. “Yes, I fucking did, fucking best thing, you—”

“Didn’t _fucking_ save you, did I?” Stiles gasps. Dragging his nails down Derek’s thighs and for all that he doesn’t have claws, he can feel the skin breaking, can feel the blood starting up under them. “Didn’t.”

“No, fuck, better, fucking _werewolf_ , not some—lost fucking thing.” Derek’s back bows, his head crushed into the mattress, wrecking his spine to force himself deeper onto Stiles. “Better, better, you _took_ me—took me back—”

Stiles comes down like a hammer with his teeth. He doesn’t get Derek’s throat proper but he gets pretty high up on Derek’s shoulder, not that far off. Derek’s voice breaks. Staggers a few times, getting hoarser and deeper, till suddenly it twists and he’s high, soft, making noises like a little broken thing in the dark. He seizes up around Stiles twice, then goes down like he’s moving in molasses, knees spreading out till he’s belly-flat. Stiles keeps fucking him and he keeps making those noises, making them and twitching his buttocks, all wistful, wishing and wanting to help but he can’t do it, he’s too laid out, big bad wolf done in with a cock up his ass.

Hell. That does it and Stiles collapses too, panting against Derek’s shoulderblade, one arm flailing and then falling so coincidentally its hand curls over Derek’s bicep. He pets that mindlessly as the aftershocks break through him.

“I want a vacation,” Stiles mutters after a while. “Staycation. Tie you to a bed, tie Peter—maybe tie you guys to each other’s cocks, let you suck till your jaws are stuck like that and fuck whichever one of you is nearest.”

Derek lets out a soft, drawn-out noise, hungry in a sleepy way. His head twists around and Stiles gets a blurry glimpse of one dark eye watching him.

“Don’t do that,” Stiles says, and then grimaces and lifts his head and shakes it. He braces himself on his hands and looks at the man under him, then sighs. Shifts his weight to one arm, uses the other one to trace after a drop of sweat, from Derek’s hairline across the back of his neck and then down his shoulder. “So how bad is Peter bugging Lydia right now?”

“He’s not,” Derek says. His muscles shift under Stiles’ finger, stretching out, and then go tight after it passes over them. “He knows better. He doesn’t want to—”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re attached,” Stiles says. He cups his hand over the back of Derek’s shoulder, then moves it to sweep up the side of Derek’s neck. It collects sweat with it and when he gets to Derek’s jaw, he pulls it off and Derek cranes over and laps at the sweat collected on the webbing between Stiles’ forefinger and thumb.

There’s a stark red semi-circle on Derek’s shoulder, where Stiles’ teeth came down. It’s fading, but slow, like human skin. Stiles looks at it, then bends down. When he kisses it, Derek whines and shudders and closes his eyes and nuzzles into Stiles’ fingers.

“Look,” Stiles says. He pauses, looking at Derek with the closed eyes, no puppy-look to blame now. “Dad and me just—kind of have a hard time with each other. I mean, that’s what I was doing there with you, you know.”

“I know you weren’t there for me,” Derek says, very quietly. He opens his eyes, but doesn’t try to look at Stiles. His lashes are still down and they tickle at Stiles’ fingertips, above where he’s mouthing gently at Stiles’ palm. “’s the point, Stiles. Wolves. We come after.”

“Sometimes you are so hot and you don’t make _any_ sense,” Stiles says. He lets Derek lip at him for another second, then braces himself again and pulls out. “And damn it, now I have to shower again.”

* * *

Lydia does more than just show up. Lydia shows up with a legit reason for her and Stiles to hang out away from Stiles’ dad for another three days, while they reroute some funds for a client. She gets them a really expensive hotel suite, at prices where the staff don’t even remember that they brought in a third person, let alone ordered him new clothes and stuffed him with food and dug bits of metal out of his back and ankles.

Derek doesn’t do much except sleep and eat and grumpily answer their questions about his backstory. At first Lydia thinks he’s withholding—actually, Stiles does too, and finds it irritating because hello, resurrected him? And he seems okay with that, so he should get with the program and realize that that requires a lot of ass-covering, even before they dig into exactly how Stiles did that. And not just on a logistical level either. Actually, clearing out Derek’s identity issues is the easiest part.

But then Stiles starts waking up and Derek’s snuggled up with him, and when Stiles isn’t around, Derek…does not snuggle Lydia, but he follows her around close enough to always make sure they’re in the same room, and they start to realize the curtness is not so much that he’s reluctant as that he’s just really, really tired. And is not that sunny a personality when he’s well-rested, let alone coming off a couple weeks of nonstop torture.

Still, he’s attached to Stiles. Or something. And Stiles might be having more and more arguments with his father about how they do what they do, but one thing his father has always insisted on and that he’s never fought over is that they take responsibility for what _they_ do. So many people, when they get pulled up and then have to face all the dead in their past, they break down right then and there because they just—didn’t think it was ever going to happen, that anybody would ever make them think about what they did. If somebody catches up with Stiles or Lydia or Stiles’ father, if that somehow happens despite all the precautions they take, well, then it happens. It might not be what Stiles thinks should happen, but it’s not going to be a _surprise_.

“I brought him back,” Stiles says.

“You have no idea how you did that,” Lydia points out. “For that matter, you don’t even know enough about it to say whether you did, in fact, do it, or if you just happened to be standing there.”

She doesn’t actually disagree with Stiles, it’s just something that they do with each other, for each other, ever since they met. “Lyds, I don’t know how I did it, but I know I did it. I know, okay?”

They sit on the balcony of their insanely expensive suite, looking down at the city. Derek’s snoozing in the bed in the room behind them, except he’s not really snoozing, and Stiles also knows that Lydia didn’t put up the anti-eavesdropping spells when Stiles forgot to when they stepped out here in the first place.

“Well, it should be fine to let him be seen in public by tomorrow,” Lydia finally says. She uncrosses and recrosses her legs, tilting her head back so that the dying light slanting over the top of the hotel paints her throat and the tops of her breasts with golden shades of red. “What are we telling your dad?”

“I’m thinking about just going with, this is Derek, he’d like to talk to you,” Stiles says. “And then leaving while they stare at each other.”

Lydia clicks her nails against the metal frame of her chair. “You’re an idiot.”

“Yep,” Stiles says.

It’s a pretty sunset. Stiles has never seen one from this far up before, and he absently tunes out the voices whispering that they’ve seen better, stretching out his legs. “Is he—”

“I think he’s better,” Lydia says, a little loud, less certain than she wants to be. She suddenly sits up and takes off her sunglasses and starts checking her phone. “I think maybe it was just that one being ex-military, and calling him out about serving too, and God, I wish we’d just hit him in the throat and done a tracheotomy.”

“If you’d done that, Dad would’ve taken two seconds to figure out why we really did it and then blown his top,” Stiles reminds her.

He gets up too and goes inside, and then stands by the side of the bed till Derek sighs and rolls over and looks up at him. Derek’s mostly gained back his weight, going from Hollywood haggard to _built_ , and all of that sprawls out in smoothly-defined slabs and Stiles jerks his head away, muttering shit about himself under his breath.

“Am I going?” Derek says.

“Look, is this some gratitude thing?” Stiles says, swinging back.

Derek lies on his back and looks upside-down at Stiles. Then twists over and pushes himself off his arms and back onto his knees, so that they’re almost level with each other. They got him a full wardrobe but he hasn’t touched any of the underwear—leaving the whole boxers versus briefs issue in limbo—and for sleeping he just throws on cotton pajamas that somehow manage to be both skin-tight around his thighs and drooping off his hips.

“Is it a sex thing?” Stiles says. “Like you get really, really turned on by coming back to life?”

“I think I’m glad I’m still around to _have_ sex,” Derek says. He’s starting to show little flickers of a very terse, dry sense of humor in between the grunting and grumbling, and it’s annoyingly attractive. “You’re running down people. I can do that.”

“Is this a werewolf thing?” Stiles says, exasperated. “Like, the dog jokes are true, and I point and you go fetch?”

Derek shifts his weight back a little, into a slouch. He scratches at some nearly-faded ligature marks on his wrist. “I’m pointing out I’m not dead weight, literally,” he says, with a faint sarcastic curl to his mouth. “You’re the one making it into an asshole thing.”

“Oh, whatever, like you can talk, you’re the species with the packs and you were down there and nobody coming after you, I can’t help but think that says something about your asshole rating,” Stiles snaps. Then he stops himself, but Derek didn’t even flinch, and weirdly, Stiles probably wouldn’t feel bad if he had, but he does now. “Just—why?”

The way Derek’s looking at him changes, even though the man doesn’t move, doesn’t blink. Just something about his eyes, no sarcasm in there anymore, no bitterness or cynicism. In place of that, they’re strangely thoughtful, like it’s all academic, really.

“I don’t want to leave,” Derek says. “I want to go.”

Stiles makes a horrendously loud, horrendously frustrated noise, complete with throwing his hands up in the hair. He steps back and looks at Derek and then steps forward and grabs both of Derek’s shoulders and yanks him in and when Stiles pushes back, they’re rolled together on the bed. He’s on Derek, Derek’s legs are splayed out around his hips and when he shifts up to get a good look at Derek’s face, Derek shifts with him, obscene and liquid, arching belly and groin so that Stiles can feel through two fucking pieces of clothing which way Derek dresses.

“Yeah, well, you wanna have sex too?” Stiles pants. He’s panting. He didn’t get any fancier than smashing their mouths together, no technique at all, and Derek wasn’t exactly finessing either and he’s panting.

Derek pants too. “Not gonna say no.”

“Jesus, you pokerfaced son of a—” And then Stiles sees movement from the corner of his eye and remembers Lydia and panics.

He gets off Derek and grabs the man’s shoulder and shoves him over, deep into the blankets, and for some reason Derek goes with it, because no way is Stiles heaving around a body like that on his own. Then Derek moves and Stiles seizes the nearest body part without thinking, which turns out to be Derek’s nape, and he’s rubbing Derek into the mattress by that as Lydia stalks across the room without looking up from her phone.

“That’s a terrible idea too,” Lydia says. “He’s not a dildo, Stiles, he’s going to stick out no matter which way you shove him.”

“Well, fine, I’m—I’m just gonna tell Dad!” Stiles calls after her.

She continues on till she’s walked through the suite and into the hall, and the door’s clicked shut behind her. Stiles lets go of Derek and pushes back, rubbing at his face, and then just collapses against the headboard. Totally not in the mood now, and so when Derek crawls up next to him, he almost pulls out his taser.

Except Derek’s not going after sex. Derek just sort of rolls up and stays there while Stiles looks at him. “You know I’m not getting any nicer, right?” Stiles finally says.

And of all things, Derek starts laughing at him. Real, shoulder-shaking, belly-shivering laughter, so that Derek is lying down and he still has to turn over, burying his face in the mattress. He’s got one hand up by his head and it kneads spastically at the sheets while he’s laughing; when he finally stops, it keeps going, but slower.

“So what?” he says.

“I don’t know,” Stiles mutters. He sees a flicker of worry go over Derek’s face and his hand goes out and then he looks at it. Then he sighs and pulls it back in, putting it over his own face instead. “Whatever. Fine. You can come.”

Derek watches him for a little while, quiet and sober. Then, slow, telegraphed, the man pushes up and pivots around, so that he’s lying alongside one of Stiles’ legs. He slides up it, his head curling down as it gets near Stiles’ belly, so that its back brushes across Stiles’ shirt and then down as he wedges it into the crook of the leg Stiles has bent up.

It’s kind of awkward, not really stable, and Derek’s head keeps slipping so he has to move it back up. His shoulder bumps into Stiles’ crotch when he does that. Not painful, just this glancing, rocking pressure every so often, so that Stiles twitches at the first time, sort of expects it the next couple, and then ends up twisting his hips as it finally starts getting somewhere with his cock. He looks down and Derek looks up, then pushes back.

“You’re not gonna be any less an asshole, right?” Stiles says as Derek pulls open his fly.

Derek shrugs as he goes down on Stiles. Which is just the first of many questions he never bothers answering.

* * *

Stiles goes out to get some ice and runs into Erica sitting on the stairwell landing, scrunched into the corner, her arms wrapped around herself. “Lydia told me if I wasn’t sure, I should text your phone and if you didn’t answer within five minutes, assume you two were fucking,” she says without looking up at him.

He stays for a second longer, then heads down one more flight to get the ice. But she’s still there when he comes back up.

It’s hot out, and the ice bucket is cheap plastic, not even insulated, but Stiles sighs and then squats down in front of her. When she looks up, frowning, he flat-out sits. “I can tell Boyd to go chill for a while if you want,” he says. “He’s asking anyway if he’s bugging you.”

Erica jerks like she’s going to be a lot nastier than the tired sigh she eventually goes with. “Nah, it’s fine, I’m pretty much used to the cold spot now,” she says. She pulls at her hair, then flicks her fingers at him. “You don’t get back, he doesn’t get all murder-y or anything?”

“Derek’s not a nuclear weapon, it’s not like I have to press a button every hour,” Stiles says.

She shrugs at him. “Well, sue me for only ever meeting werewolves who call vendetta if you don’t kiss their boots the second you meet them.”

They sit in silence for a minute. Two minutes. Stiles’ phone buzzes in his pocket and he sticks his hand in and texts Derek back without looking. Erica’s eyes go to his hand, and the little movements it makes in the pocket, but she doesn’t say anything. She does move her arms, from around her knees to on top of them.

“I think you can go,” she suddenly says.

“Do you want me to?” Stiles says.

Her eyes flare blue and she straightens up, one arm swinging down to plant its hand against the floor like she’s going to get up. Then she slumps back. “I felt good when he died. I did. I haven’t felt that damn good since—since right before I got bit, when I thought finally, somebody doesn’t just see the sick girl.”

Stiles nods.

She eyes him a little bit, her fingers curling up against the concrete floor. “It’s just—just that it doesn’t last and now I feel like a tortured, broken bitch again. And I paid up front so I don’t know what you’re trying to do with this act. It’s not like if I drop out, you’re gonna stop going after them.”

“I think Boyd’s gonna stay in, too,” Stiles says, just as Erica shivers violently. He watches her clap her hand to her arm, not exactly afraid but not comfortable either, and then struggle to pull back her blank face for him. “Well, that’s true, but then it’s not like if I sit here, it’s gonna stop me from going after them.”

“You’re kind of a jerk for a stone-cold psycho,” Erica says, making a face at him. She pulls herself back and a little down the wall, her feet sliding out so that she makes a space for her arms, when she tucks them in under her breasts. “I think if this wasn’t all about getting the sick fucks who killed Boyd and the rest of my pack, I could maybe go for that, but…”

“It’s for you, too,” Stiles says after a moment. He watches her, watches the way she breathes in and the hike of one side of her mouth with that, the flick of the muscles in her eyelids and the uneasy ripple of her fingers against her arms. “You’re on a revenge trip, you know, you don’t have to pretend it’s altruistic. This is as far from altruism as you can get.”

“So I’m a selfish bitch too, that’s what you’re saying?” she snaps.

Stiles shrugs. “Yeah.” He waits for it to sink into her. “Also, so?”

Erica sucks in her breath, real tight, and her eyes get a bluish, glowing rim around the pupils without truly going werewolf. She’s thinking behind that, he can tell, and then she grins at him, the kind of grin that makes him think her old alpha knew what she was doing, picking Erica out.

“Yeah, I could _really_ go for you,” Erica says. She pulls her arms down to either side of herself and pushes herself forward. Her face swings to within an inch of Stiles before she twists away. 

She takes the ice bucket with her. After a second, Stiles shrugs again and gets up and follows her. 

The door to their room swings open a few seconds before they’re abreast of it. Derek, of course, but he looks a little perturbed. Which means that it must be pretty damn serious. “Peter called,” he says, before Stiles can ask. “He thinks you should talk to Lydia.”

“Is she in trouble?” Stiles asks, walking into the room.

Derek hesitates. “He just said you need to talk to her.”

“You said should, and now it’s need and which is it?” Stiles says.

“Jesus, he’s just passing on a message,” Erica says. Her back is to them. She’s putting the bucket down and then opening it to get a handful of ice, which she then pops into her mouth, a chip at a time, and crunches loudly. “It’s like you don’t give a shit that you could cut off his head and stick it in a pile of wolfsbane, and he still wouldn’t come after you.”

Stiles has his hand up on Derek’s chest before she’s done, not that that stops Derek from snarling, or pushing into Stiles’ hand like he genuinely will go after her. So Stiles presses down and Derek still has his lips peeled back from his fangs, but he shifts over and then he lets Stiles tuck his head down against Stiles’ neck.

“Trying to do my job?” Stiles says, pulling out his phone.

“Oh, hell, no,” Erica says, crossing the room. As Stiles moves into the bathroom, she turns on the TV, and then turns it way up.

* * *

“You did what?” Stiles’ dad says, right when Stiles starts out with admitting he went on a hunt they hadn’t all vetted together, and Stiles thinks he’s going to get it.

Stiles plows on anyway, getting the whole story out, and his dad listens, face all tight, hand clenching around the bathroom counter. It’s…a long story, actually, and as nervous as Stiles is, his legs can’t keep up with it so he moves around to sit down on the edge of the bathtub. His dad ends up sitting on the toilet, and it’s only when Stiles is done and his hands are falling out of his last gesture that he realizes the room is so small they’re only a couple inches apart.

He takes a deep breath, and his father lets out one. “Stiles,” his dad says, like it’s a start.

“I know,” Stiles says.

And grabs at his knees and takes another breath, and…nothing. He stares at the floor for another second, then works up the courage to look at his father and the man is looking at Stiles but for some reason, he no longer looks that angry. He doesn’t look happy but he doesn’t look like he’s going to go right down the line of mistakes Stiles made.

Then his dad gets up and leaves the bathroom. Stiles stares dumbly for a second before getting his feet under him, hurrying after, and coming up just in time to find his dad stop in front of Derek, who’s leaning against the couch, phone in hand like he’d just been checking it.

“You okay?” his dad asks Derek. Kind of curtly, but still, there’s some genuine interest.

Derek thinks so too, his brows ticking up a little, shoulders shifting in a way Stiles is learning to recognize as uneasy. “Close enough, considering,” he says slowly.

Stiles’ father studies him, and Stiles…doesn’t know what’s going on or what his dad is thinking, and to be honest, that might actually be worse than a full-on screaming match. They’re close, and anyway, his dad isn’t the kind of guy to hide his feelings and it’s just—this doesn’t come up and Stiles doesn’t know what to do, and so he just stands there.

“You sticking around?” his dad asks.

“Yeah,” Derek says, and then his head jerks a little towards Stiles. “If he wants me to.”

Stiles’ dad purses his lips and it’s kind of a relief, recognizing a disapproving look. But then he snorts and turns away, and not towards Stiles either. He’s aiming for the dresser, where he picks up some papers and his keys.

“You’re gonna figure this out, Stiles,” he says.

At the time, Stiles thinks that his dad, somehow, amazingly, has seen through his rambling, doubled-up, nervy storytelling to the truth, the real truth, and gets it. He thinks his dad is telling him that whatever the hell they’ve just tripped into _now_ , they’ll come out all right. So at the time, he’s grateful. Stupid grateful.

He still thinks some of that was mixed in, but these days he also thinks that his father was saying: _because I just can’t._


	3. Chapter 3

“You’re scaring Peter,” Stiles says.

 _“Peter scares Peter,”_ Lydia says tartly. She props up her phone so that he can see she’s got a butterfly bandage on one finger, two chipped nails on that hand, and that she’s busy ordering more guns. _“He just thinks that I’m being much too relaxed about the hotel arrangements.”_

Stiles sighs and puts his head in his hand. “Dad?”

 _“We’re going to be out, we can’t wait around for him. And if the concierge was stupid enough to let somebody else into that room, then that’s what magic is for,”_ Lydia says, scrolling through some customer reviews. She clicks to filter by star rating and then sets it for all the zero-to-one ratings.

“So where is Peter?” Stiles asks.

 _“I made him go check whether the garage is cleaned up for us yet,”_ Lydia says. She scrolls down a review like she’s reading it, then scrolls back up to its start. Reads it twice more, then spits out a frustrated sigh. _“Did he text you? He’s not texting me anymore. I asked him whether we needed to get another car for him and he’s not answering.”_

Stiles chews at his lip a few times, then gets up from where he’d been sitting on the toilet. Then sits back down, leaving Derek, who’d gotten half-up from his perch on the bathtub rim, hovering awkwardly. Then he gets up again and looks at Derek and Derek gets into the tub. Stretches out in it, puts his arm out, and helps Stiles get down to sprawl on top of him.

 _“Well, I put one on reserve anyway,”_ Lydia mutters. _“Are you two still screwing Erica?”_

“I don’t think she’s into us anymore,” Stiles says. “I don’t know, maybe we should’ve sent her up with you two instead.”

Lydia rolls her eyes, but she’s tapping a nail incessantly against her laptop keyboard. _“I keep wondering if we really should have her around when he gets here. You know what he said, and she’s got a gift for saying exactly the wrong thing—”_

“Or the right thing.” Something is digging into Stiles’ ass, not in a good way, so he grabs the tub rim and shifts over, so his back is up against the side of the tub. His head slides to Derek’s shoulder and Derek tips his chin out of the way. “The funny thing is, she seems to be neutral on you. No talk about Lydia the ice queen, insisting on no mercy, blah blah blah.”

 _“Not my type,”_ Lydia says flatly. Then she makes a face at the laptop and does some angry-sounding typing, her dangly earrings bouncing with the force of it.

Stiles waits a few seconds, but she just keeps typing, so he finally sighs to get her attention. “I’ll talk to Peter,” he says, then hangs up.

Peter answers from somewhere dark enough to make the screen just a bunch of dark splotches. _“She hasn’t touched up her manicure,”_ he immediately says.

“Yeah, I saw, we were just talking and turn on the lights, would you? Just because you have night vision doesn’t mean we’re gonna be messing around with Kali in the dark,” Stiles says.

There’s a click, the screen temporarily blots white, and then Peter comes back into view, perfectly and expensively coiffed in the middle of a very grungy garage. _“We also need another broker,”_ he says. _“This is the third location that’s significantly deviated from the photos.”_

“Okay, whatever,” Stiles sighs, slouching down Derek’s chest. “Also, just stay out of Lydia’s way till we get there, would you? She and Dad have—you don’t want to get into that.”

Peter looks like he agrees, but he also thinks he could know about that without getting into it. But in the end, he just nods and then flips the camera to show Stiles a half-clogged drain. _“I’ve already asked for our deposit to be reimbursed,”_ he says. _“I was also starting to vet replacements, if we’re going to be on hold while your father’s here.”_

“He’s not visiting,” Stiles snaps.

Under him, Derek tenses. On the phone screen, Peter winces and then pushes his face into charming, conciliatory mode, with a lot less grace than he usually has. _“My apologies, that didn’t come out like I…anyway, I meant—”_

Stiles rolls his eyes. “Dad said he’s back. We’re not taking a break. He knows we’re in the middle of something and if he wanted us to stop, he would’ve said.”

Peter’s silent, and Derek gets even more tense. His breathing is shifting across the side of Stiles’ head, like he might duck around and say something. He’s always snapping at Peter to not push it, and for all that Peter snaps at Derek back to stop blundering around, then, it’s usually Peter who feels the need to probe at all the fake shit Stiles says.

They’re not lies. Lies are straight-up wrong. Faking it is just covering up the truth.

 _“If it’d help—and it may not be us, but there’s something to be said for exacerbating factors—we could have the broker find an extra—”_ is what Peter finally goes with. Pulling his punch, for once.

“He said he’s _back_ ,” Stiles snaps. “You can stay put, or you can just walk for good, all right?”

 _“All right, then, I’ll just wait for you,”_ Peter says quickly, so he can cover up that desperate edge to his voice.

He waits for Stiles to hang up on him, camera flipped back around so that he’s staring into it. The video quality is on the grainy side, but even so, it’s obvious that he’s brittle as hell under his composure, and after the call is done, Stiles drops his phone onto the bathmat and then pulls his arms in and feels closer to eggshells than he’d like, too.

Derek takes a breath. Just a normal one, not like he’s going to talk, just a breath like all his other breaths, and Stiles can’t help himself. “I don’t know why you two keep acting like he’s going to wreck everything,” Stiles mutters. “He’s the one who got me and Lydia started. He’s the one who told me not to kick you guys out.”

He doesn’t think Derek’s going to respond, that’s why he says it in the first place, but Derek sucks his breath a little and then moves his shoulder under Stiles’ head. “We just—” he starts.

Stiles lifts his head. Derek presses his lips together, looking warily back. “Just?” Stiles prompts.

Derek looks like he wishes he’d never started, but he doesn’t pull his eyes away. “Just…you missed him,” he says. “We never made up for that.”

“Well, you’re not him, he’s my _dad_ ,” Stiles says, but the sting in his voice is dying, he can hear it. He puts his head back on Derek’s shoulder. “Stupid. That’s not the point of you anyway.”

“Yeah,” Derek says. “Yeah, we know that.” 

* * *

Derek is basically Stiles’ first boyfriend. He’s not the first guy who’s taken Stiles out on dates, or who Stiles has had sex with, or who’s even met Stiles’ father. Stiles doesn’t mean it like that.

They don’t date. That thing where he crawls into bed with Stiles, he does that the first night they’re all back together, even though Stiles’ dad has the other double queen so that Lydia can have the couch fold-out (and the living room) all to herself. “Are you kidding me,” Stiles mumbles, half-asleep and that is the only reason he’s ignoring Derek nosing at the back of his neck. “There’s living dangerously, and there’s running into a bullet.”

Derek grunts and Stiles is kind of learning to expect that, and Stiles falls asleep and then wakes up with Derek’s erection rubbing into his back. Stiles lies there, then twists onto his back and Derek makes a whiffly noise through his nose, definitely asleep. And Stiles’ dad is still over on the other bed, and Stiles looks at the ceiling and his hand slips down into Derek’s pants and around Derek’s cock, and then when Derek wakes up with a head-jerk, Stiles cranes around to keep him quiet with a messy kiss.

“Bathroom,” he hisses, giving Derek’s cock a tug.

They do have sex. Stiles is…different, he’s always known that, but this time he admits that he’s screwing around for real, running for the bullets he mocked Derek over. He’s never been the kind of problem child who pulls shit just to get his dad to look at him; he’s always had other reasons, like saving Lydia from being mentally institutionalized, or learning how to live with ghosts whispering to him all the time. Pretty good reasons, he thinks, even if he didn’t always go about handling them the right way.

But this is pretty much—well. Look. Sex with Derek is good. There’s that.

It starts out like that morning, furtive hand- and blowjobs just before his dad might come in on it. Derek hates giving up anything personal about himself but he has no shame about following Stiles’ lead, and that includes getting down on his knees when Stiles points, or getting up and pressing his back against the wall, or any position Stiles feels like. Which, pretty naturally, segues into getting off first but leaving Derek hanging, for a couple minutes to a couple hours, and then seeing that blown, dazed look when Derek finally gets to come. Hearing that little grateful noise Derek always muffles into Stiles’ belly or shoulder, whatever’s near.

The cases have been getting more complex for a while now, requiring more investigative work, more prep work, longer lead times. And Stiles and Lydia are old enough to have driver’s licenses and not get that much side-eye walking into places like hotels on their own, so it makes sense to start splitting up, not making Stiles’ father go everywhere with them. So he’s around less but Stiles and Derek keep having sex.

There’s a lot of downtime with what they do and Derek knows ghosts are always hanging around but he cares as much about them as he does about living people. And he looks even better getting edged when Stiles is there watching him for the whole half-hour, hour, whatever, flat on the bed, kneading the sheets with sloppier and sloppier hands, groaning through each shudder. He likes getting fucked, likes getting his prostate stroked till he’s reduced to a bunch of attractive jelly.

Stiles’ hands and wrists get sore, that’s how they go to toys. He’s already used to buying stuff on the Darknet anyway, so sex toys, those are just funny. Fun. Dildos and vibrators and butt plugs, fleshlights and clamps and sounds. Lydia starts pointing out that she has less luggage.

And Stiles starts leaving things out. It’s not on purpose, not consciously, anyway, but they move a lot and they’re used to living out of each other’s pockets and his dad’s changing up the pattern anyway, being away and then coming back. Derek ends up sprawling through a couple meals with things up his ass, grunting even more than usual, because honest to God, that was the nearest, easiest place to hide them when they heard Stiles’ dad coming. Lydia extorts two seasons’ wardrobes for pretending that a fleshlight is actually a new kind of taser she’s working on. Sex toys get shoved into cushions and under pillows and kicked under dressers, and Stiles has _amazing_ sex.

Derek heals, anyway. He heals, and sometimes if he thinks Stiles has been at the computer too long, he’ll go and stuff his own ass, show up by Stiles on the bed with glazed eyes and the tip of his erection bobbing up past his waistband. Once he put clamps on his nipples and they went out to recon an office building, and when they were halfway done he dropped to his knees on the roof and blew Stiles. Afterward, feeling him up, Stiles found the clamps and pulled them off and sucked on the nipples while they healed up, till Lydia called them to finish up already.

It’s really, really good sex, and Stiles enjoys it, and then afterward, Derek curls up with him and he gets used to it and gets used to somebody who doesn’t hear ghosts but who knows about them and who really just doesn’t give a fuck. So he kind of forgets.

He and Derek are dozing one day when his dad walks in with something in hand. “This is yours, right?” his dad says.

Stiles blinks at it. “Yeah,” he says, and then he looks at it, really looks at it, and realizes what it is and comes closer to dying right there than any time somebody’s tried to kill them.

When the butt plug slips through his fingers as his dad’s passing it over, his dad sighs and catches it in his other hand, and then just pushes it across the bed to right in front of Stiles’ face. “You need to keep track of your things,” his dad says. “You leave stuff like that around, you might as well text around our address.”

“Uh…yeah. Sorry,” Stiles’ mouth says, out of a complete lack of what else to.

His father starts to walk off, then stops and looks at him again and that’s when Stiles notices—well, Stiles has been thinking, in the back of his head, that something was off. That was the whole reason for his stupid little half-assed attention-quest anyway, even if it blurred up a bit with how insanely, unremittingly committed Derek was to making the sex good, too. But that’s the first time Stiles thinks that his father looks…resigned.

“I’ve known you your whole life, kid,” his dad says. “Just…watch yourself once in a while, would you?”

It feels like his dad’s trying to say something else too, like a garbled transmission, and when his dad walks off, Stiles almost calls after him to say so. To say that Stiles doesn’t understand all of it, and wait, and what. Except that—except that, it’s so stupid, Stiles suddenly thinks. Wanting his dad’s attention, when he knows he always has it, and…he doesn’t even know what he wanted his dad to do with it anyway, but what he’s always done, which is be a dad to Stiles.

“You want to stop?” Derek mutters, and Stiles realizes he’s awake.

“What?” Stiles snaps, because Derek is there and his father isn’t. “Stop what? Stop fucking? Stop the toys? What, you’re just gonna follow me around with an endless hardon like some porno puppy?”

“Whatever,” Derek says, sounding tired and sad.

And he looks so…startled, that one second when Stiles rolls over, right before Stiles calls him stupid and grabs the back of Derek’s neck and then shoves his own face against its side. “Goddamn it,” Stiles hisses. “No, okay? Just—no.”

So Derek is Stiles’ first boyfriend. Because Derek’s the first, and only, one to make that offer.

* * *

They get into town just a little ahead of Kali, who’s spotted checking into a much, much cheaper hotel right as they’ve finished dinner and Lydia is about to break down the layout of their rental garage. Peter goes out of the room to take a call and then comes back in with an odd look on his face, and hands the phone to Stiles.

“It’s Clay’s group,” he says. “They tranqed her, have her ready for pick-up. Said your father arranged it and it’s already paid.”

There’s a sharp snapping noise and Erica gets her claws stuck in the table, jumping. Lydia gives those claws a _look_ and snaps the piece of paper again, like she might use the edge to just slice off Erica’s fingers. Stiles opens his mouth, then shuts it and pivots away as he hears his dad.

 _“Hey, son,”_ his father says.

“Hey,” Stiles says. He walks off a few yards, enough to pretend like he’s having a semi-private conversation, not enough to keep Lydia from listening. “So. You’re hanging with your Army buddies?”

His dad takes a deep breath, while in the background somebody calls somebody else out about the fucking aces and are they joking with a bitchy preflop raise like that. _“Yeah, well, we’re a little inland for Navy.”_

“Hah,” Stiles says.

“Should I go or something?” Erica mutters.

“Sit down and memorize where the ventilation is because dead people aren’t going to care about that for you,” Lydia tells her.

 _“I was coming down, and heard that they were on Kali’s tail too,”_ his dad says. A gruff voice comes over the clatter of poker chips and his dad makes a tight, amused noise, like when he’s thinking he’s actually more in the mood to punch somebody in the face. _“Fine, all right, not them, but…a woman of Clay’s acquaintance, and anyway, made a detour to save you the trouble of sorting it out with them. He still owes me money anyway.”_

Stiles laughs and it’s a weird laugh, even to him. It feels weird, like it’s disconnected from his body. It’s like his body is moving one way but somebody hits ‘play’ so that some other noise comes out instead. “Okay, so you’re already in town? Are you—are you gonna be there when we come down?”

Pretty much the only answer he needs is how his dad doesn’t immediately answer. Still, it’s not till he hears his dad’s little, tired exhale that he can feel his shoulders drop. _“I got something still l—I need to wrap something up, drive back out for a day or so, so let’s just keep planning on Friday,”_ his father says slowly. _“Besides, I’d just get in the way.”_

“There’s room,” Lydia says, her eyes on how she is smoothing out her layout plan as if she is smoothing out the mountains and the valleys under those palms.

On the other end of the line, a voice comments that Clay never met a debt he couldn’t double, and if Stilinski doesn’t get back to the table soon, it’ll be triple. “Okay,” Stiles says. “Sure. It’s your welcome-back tour, you get your parade whenever you want.”

 _“Stiles, if there is anything remotely resembling a firework, I will take back every knife you’ve ever swiped from me,”_ his dad says, sounding almost—maybe happy. Then he sighs, and his voice drifts as he tells them to just blind off his chips for the damn round, he’ll be back in a second. _“You all fine there?”_

“Yeah, yeah, we’re good. You know us, we’re peachy till we’re keening,” Stiles says.

His dad laughs, that dry, kind of thin laugh he’d taken up towards the end, and mutters something that makes it sound for a second like he’s going to respond. But no, he just says be careful, which isn’t a response, it’s a sign-off. And then he lets Stiles hang up first.

“I need coffee,” Lydia immediately says.

“Sure,” Stiles says, going into the kitchen.

Derek and Erica stay with Lydia. Peter follows Stiles, walking close enough behind that he’s nearly clipping Stiles’ heels, his breath loud at the back of Stiles’ neck, all the annoying stalker things that earns him the shove back into the counter. Which Peter takes with a startled laugh and a grin, looking coyly down through his lashes as his chin hikes up, less submissive than, again, asking for it.

“I take it my nephew wasn’t comforting enough?” he says. He plays up his wince as Stiles reaches up and digs nails into the side of his neck, then arches into it, purring when Stiles scratches him deep enough to leave a drop of blood beading on his throat. “Shocking. Feelings of inadequacy are his specialty, after all.”

“You know what’s shocking?” Stiles says. He tucks his fingers into the front pockets of Peter’s trousers, angling them in to the swell of Peter’s cock, and leans forward to click his teeth just in front of Peter’s Adam’s apple. “That you even think that’s gonna _work_ on me. No wonder Lydia was sending you on the shit jobs, if you’re stooping to JV shit like that.”

He kisses the retort out of Peter, grinding into the other man till all that’s coming out are deep, shaking groans, his hands digging open Peter’s fly, pushing his clothes out of the way, pulling out the more than half-hard cock. Peter hitches as the air hits his erection, moaning extra-long, his arms banging back into the counter as he tries to pull himself up.

Stiles grabs his hips and pulls him back down. And then shoves him into the counter again, when he tries to drop farther, get onto his knees. Moves one hand to hold him under the jaw, squeezing in with forefinger and thumb as Peter tries to rock up, slide himself on either side of Stiles’ thigh and sneak out something. Peter subsides with a whine, hands wrapped around the counter edge, as Stiles gropes with his free hand and then gets the drawer open.

The top of the drawer catches one of Peter’s fingers, making him hiss into Stiles’ mouth as Stiles gets out the jar of salve base, slicks up. Then he goes back to moaning as Stiles closes his hand around the bottom of Peter’s cock just a little too tight. “Jesus, you want to shut up a little?” Stiles says, pulling back. Curling his fingers, catching them on Peter’s short hairs before dragging his nails up the side of Peter’s cock. “Fucking werewolves, man, they can hear through the walls.”

Peter laugh-whimpers, hiking his cock up into Stiles’ grip. Then he slumps back as Stiles pushes his hand back down the man’s cock, nice and slow, a good prelude to something…that Stiles doesn’t bother pretending he was ever considering, yanking his hand off Peter. When Peter jerks, Stiles uses his grip on Peter’s throat to slam him into the cabinets hard enough that Peter loses his balance.

Then lets go, leaving Peter to haul himself back up against the counter. In the meantime Stiles walks over to the freezer and pulls out an icepack, then comes back. Peter’s just straightened up when Stiles slaps the pack against his crotch, square over his cock, and then holds it there with a flat palm and a stare.

He watches Peter’s pupils blow out, lips spasm back from lengthening canines. Peter tries to snarl and to strangle a shout at the same time, and is more successful at the first than the second. If Peter really wanted to, he could get away from it. He’s a goddamn _werewolf_.

Peter’s at least smart enough to remember that Stiles will tase him before he gets an inch from the counter. He maybe cracks the wood some, clenching it as he squirms and twists behind the icepack, but he doesn’t try to duck out. Some of his hair falls out of its styling and into his eyes, and he makes a couple comical tosses of his head before finally dragging up one hand and scraping the strands out of the way. Scarlet threads track across his forehead for a second where he’s scratched himself.

Stiles pulls away the pack and Peter slumps heavily, going down to one elbow against the counter. But he’s panting for the pack, eyes tracking it, licking his lips as Stiles reaches around and tosses it over Peter’s shoulder onto the counter. “So sorry,” Peter says. “I thought the problem—problem might be not enough communi—”

His fangs are extended when Stiles grabs a hand over his mouth. They press into Stiles’ palm, hard with the promising graze of the tips at the bottom, and when Stiles pulls his hand away, Peter’s grinning. Loose and wild, less wolf than something completely untethered to the physical world, just pure smoke and flash.

He feels solid enough when Stiles picks up his limp, shrunken cock. It’s still chilly from the icepack, and the salve residue feels more like globs of wax; Stiles has to pull his hand down the cock once to get off enough so that it’ll fit into the cage. In comparison the cage’s plastic feels as warm as blood.

Peter sags against the counter, chin tipped up. He yanks at his tie, pulling it loose, and then again, swinging it to the side and ripping off the top couple buttons on his shirt, too. Then he reaches at the flapping side of his collar, only to make a disappointed noise when Stiles slaps his hand away. Stiles snorts but otherwise ignores that, grabbing Peter by the hips and pulling him up, and then, just before Peter would’ve kissed him, twisting him around to go belly-down on the counter.

Then Stiles gets some more of the salve. Sticks two fingers into Peter, lets the man shudder himself loose around them, and pulls them out. He fucks in his cock, twice, two quick shoves, and then pulls out completely. 

Peter’s head had gone down on the counter, but he raises that now, craning around to try and look at Stiles. He’s annoyed and then he sees the wooden spoon and he’s disbelieving and amused and then Stiles hits him with it. His eyes are glazing over, when his head drops.

The spoon doesn’t last very long. About three blows and then the handle snaps. The marks it leaves on Peter’s ass aren’t that interesting anyway, just straight lines. Stiles likes the marks that the spatula leaves a lot better: curvy where the metal handle bent, then the flare out at the top. The plastic of the spatula’s head is so whippy that it doesn’t leave the same silhouette twice across the pale, clenching buttocks.

“Stiles,” Peter hisses, as a little bit of blood splatters down the back of his thigh. His arms press out to either side of him, rocking back and forth as he heaves out short, uneven gasps. He’s wiggling on his belly, and while there’s not much time in between blows, there’s still enough for him to make clear he’s pushing up into them. “ _Stiles_.”

“Would you just shut up for once?” Stiles snaps, and then he throws the spatula past Peter. “My _dad_ just—”

He doesn’t finish. The spatula bounces off the wall, just missing Peter’s suddenly-still shoulder, and falls to the counter. Stiles stares at Peter’s ass for a few seconds, while the candy striping disappears, and then he jerks back a step. His pants around his ankles catch him and he curses, then yanks them up to around his hips. Does them back up; it’s not comfortable but they’re loose enough that he’s not going to cut off his circulation, give himself gangrene or anything like that.

Stiles goes to the sink and washes his hands very carefully. He pushes the flesh back from the underside of his nails and rubs in between each finger, and over all his knuckles, and then does it all a second time. And then he makes coffee.

When the coffeemaker stops dripping, Stiles pours out two mugs’ worth and then carries them back to the other room. Derek’s sprawled in his chair, looking pretty genuinely pissed at whatever’s on his phone, even if that tent in the front of his jeans is seriously testing the structural integrity of his zipper. He glances up, but just for a second, and then goes back to texting.

Erica glances up and stays staring as Stiles sets one mug beside Lydia, then keeps the other for himself. “Are you actually going to—” she starts.

Lydia sips her coffee, then raises both brows over it. “Do you think he doesn’t wash his hands?” she says.

“You’re freaking the hell out of Boyd,” Erica says after a second. Her eyes flick to Stiles and then jerk away. “Don’t even—I don’t need to know what he’s saying, Jesus, he’s so freaked it’s crossing the life-death divide and just, seriously, don’t you people ever _break_?”

She probably means ‘take a break.’ She looks way too rattled to be that sharp, but still, Stiles jerks his mug a little. And Lydia snaps her hand out and covers the top and steadies it, and then takes a deep breath, right when Stiles would’ve said something.

“You’re clear on the order,” she says to Erica.

“Yeah. Yep. Just do whatever the fuck you say the dead are saying,” Erica says, a little laughing, a little shrill. She pushes back from the table, pauses, and then twists out from her chair and walks off towards the bedroom.

“Stiles,” Lydia says.

Who doesn’t want his coffee. He puts it on the table and he thinks he did that pretty calmly, but the damn mug bounces in place and coffee splashes up and out, getting over his hand and the table and the edge of Lydia’s layout. He winces but she doesn’t. “Yeah, just give me…I’m gonna get something for that.”

“Stiles,” Lydia says again.

He doesn’t look at her as he walks back into the kitchen. He knows they always put the paper towels in the one cabinet—they move so much that of course they’ve got a system for putting stuff away, so whatever the configuration, they know where what they need is—but he still goes to the wrong one and checks it. Then shuts the cabinet, shaking his head at himself, and turns and…

Peter’s still on the counter. Head down, slightly curled into a shoulder because the counter is too short and he’d be making a hole in the wall if he tried to lie out straight. His eyes are closed and he’s breathing raggedly but pretty slowly, bent arms tucked into his sides, one first squeezed under his chin. His ass is perfect, pristine, just rounding out into the air for anything.

“Get off that,” Stiles sighs.

It takes a second for Peter to do it. Of course it does, it’s him, not Derek, and even when he’s trying, he just…he gives himself away, that’s what things like that pause do. Just gives it away, the whole careless needling, the you can’t fuck me _nearly_ bloody enough act.

He doesn’t need to pause. Doesn’t need to make the little noise, stillborn surprise making his throat hum as Stiles pushes him back into the wall by the fridge, doesn’t need to kiss back when Stiles grabs the backs of his thighs and smashes forward into his mouth. But he does that, and gives it all away.

Peter grabs one of Stiles’ shoulders and the top of the fridge, hiking himself up for the first few minutes as Stiles fingers him open. He’s trying a lot harder to keep quiet now, small strangled moans barely leaking out. He loses his grip on the fridge when Stiles pulls both hands back to his ass and hefts up, blunt nails scrabbling across the freezer front as he then sinks down onto Stiles’ cock. His knees dig at Stiles’ sides, working to keep from sliding down, and one of his heels jams into Stiles’ back near enough the kidney that Stiles rams him into the wall.

The heel slips and Peter arches enough to split up their mouths. He’s still stifling himself, forcing his noises to rasping, sucking inhales and the occasional rough whine, even though his hands and thighs are trembling against Stiles. That cock cage rolls between them till the edge catches under one of Stiles’ ribs and it’s annoying and Stiles throws himself up into Peter, fucking in till Peter’s full-on groaning, till he can get his mouth up by Peter’s ear. “Get it off,” he hisses.

He drags back, his teeth scraping along Peter’s jaw. He’s not sure if Peter’s heard, but then Peter flops an arm down, worms in there. The cage comes off, fumbling out from between them, and Peter paws at Stiles’ shoulder, squirming down on Stiles’ cock, before snapping his arm out and seizing the top of the fridge again. He smears some blood over the freezer door, but he must not have nicked himself that badly because he comes, head curling back against the wall.

Stiles bites the side of the offered throat, and for all that he’s not the werewolf, that does it for him. He staggers a good couple inches, then bangs Peter into the wall again, trying to deal with the man’s weight and his own orgasm, and Peter’s still too busy with his own aftershocks to help out. Somehow they end up on the floor, Stiles still half-in Peter, and neither of them have any serious damage, and Stiles has no idea how that happened but he’ll take it.

Peter tucks his head against Stiles’ shoulder. The lines Stiles’ teeth grooved out are still very red, very distinct, and when Stiles moves and his breath happens to cross them, Peter shivers and makes that small surprised noise again.

“Why do you,” Stiles starts, but he doesn’t have the breath yet. He flaps his hand against Peter’s knee instead. “You still. You know better.”

“Well, possibly,” Peter says. He shifts, dropping just a little further onto Stiles’ cock, and then breathes in sharply as Stiles braces himself and pulls completely out. “But it’s not…entirely about knowing better, now, is it? At least for—”

“Derek was totally fine, actually,” Stiles mutters, getting up.

Then he looks down. Peter’s still slumped against the fridge and is looking up at him, wrecked and sober about it. “I realize that,” he says. He pauses, fingers of one hand curling in slightly. “Stiles. For what it’s worth, from what I saw, I don’t think your father left because—”

“Please don’t talk about my dad,” Stiles says, walking off.

* * *

So, Peter. Yeah. The first time Stiles meets Peter, it’s not because Peter’s dead. Although it is because Stiles is smashing a baseball bat into the back of Peter’s head.

It’s nothing personal, it’s just that there is a locked file cabinet and Peter is between Stiles and the cabinet, and Stiles is running late. Not so late that he doesn’t peg a werewolf when he sees one, and—well, notice that Peter is kind of hot, while rolling the man over and planting a foot on his chest and then tasing him for good measure, staring down into his blank blue eyes and spasming face. But yeah, late. So Stiles doesn’t exactly stop and exchange phone numbers.

But then a couple weeks later, Stiles is breaking into another office, so he can set up for a meeting his dad’s having later, and for some reason he misses that there’s somebody using the adjoining bathroom right till the toilet flushes. He knows it’s not the target and they generally don’t kill people the ghosts don’t name as part of the revenge trip, so he slides up alongside the door, and when it opens, he tases them. Then ties them up with zipstrips.

Which doesn’t work, because werewolf, and Stiles is just annoyed enough about the double slip-up that he doesn’t really _look_ at the guy till he’s got him all hog-tied with the special magicked duct tape and slapped a couple pieces over his mouth, too. The man’s making noises behind them, doing that and pulling at where his wrists and ankles are strapped together behind him, and Stiles gets up, looks at his face, and then shakes his head. “Wow, okay. So…yeah, bad luck on your part, but let’s make a deal. I won’t shoot you with the wolfsbane bullets if you pretend I was five-four with a beer belly and a limp, okay?”

The man snorts, and looks very amused with the bits of face around the tape gag. Stiles…thinks that’s a little weird, but he’s running late again so he does his stuff and then drags the man into the bathroom and locks him in there. He does swing back after his dad’s meeting, but all there is, is a bunch of tape shreds and the pieces of a broken-up men’s razor, so he figures maybe it’s just taken care of itself.

In his defense, he’s having a bad month. His dad is getting increasingly withdrawn, and when he does manage to get the man to say anything, it’s mostly conversations about how they need to be more thorough about their vetting, making sure that a ghost is really being accurate about what happened and doesn’t just have an ax to grind. Which Stiles thinks about too, but he and Lydia have learned every truth spell and lie-detection method out there, and he just doesn’t know what else they could possibly do.

Lydia’s worried, too, and she’s showing it by picking fights with all of them, and Derek is trying so hard to stay out of it that Stiles ends up yelling at him for it and storming out and doing recon on a deserted warehouse a night earlier than planned.

Mostly deserted. There’s this guy who’s apparently squatting in the foreman’s office, which has a handy attached shower. A familiar guy.

“Well, hello,” he says, once Stiles is sitting on him with a taser jammed under his jaw. “I was starting to think we’d never get to actual introductions.”

“Hi, stalker,” Stiles says, pushing the taser just a little harder. “Why are you stalking me, again? I mean, do you not know—”

“Oh, no, no, I’m fully aware that your father and your, ah, friend, I suppose?” the man says, smiling with just a touch too insinuation. This time, the taser prongs start a little trickle of blood from the underside of his chin. He hisses, shifting under Stiles. “I know that you’re a pair of nemeses and a banshee. And the fact that you’ve associated with each other for so long alone would be fascinating by itself—”

Stiles can’t help a sigh. “Do you really think that it helps to make me sound like some insect that you’re studying?”

“Insect?” the man says. He sounds indignant. “Are you joking? The first documented spontaneous nemeses in the New World since Pizarro and you’re comparing yourself to insects? Do you even have any _idea_ what you are?”

It’s…weird. Stiles stares at the man and works out where exactly things took a turn into Wackyland, and as he’s doing that, the man shifts again and Stiles moves back without thinking and—he stares even harder. “What the…are you getting off on this? Seriously?”

“Stiles,” the man sighs. “I’m a _werewolf_.”

Well, then Stiles knocks him out. And goes. And his dad’s out when he gets back to where they’re staying, so he sits down on the couch and sort of doesn’t listen as Lydia comes in, asks where he’s been, tells him they have to figure out what’s eating his dad, yells at him a little bit.

“What, I know, but if he thinks we’re doing it wrong, then there’s gotta be something we’re not seeing,” Stiles finally snaps. “He wouldn’t say that if he didn’t mean—”

“What if _he’s_ what’s wrong,” Lydia snaps back, and then she looks horrified. She’s so quick about it that Stiles almost asks her what’s the matter, but then he figures it just as she raises her hand. “I didn’t mean it like that. I didn’t—I just—”

Stiles can’t exactly be mad at her for saying what everybody’s thinking. Even his dad—he can tell, can tell with how he keeps catching his father looking at his hands after they’ve killed somebody. And he just—he doesn’t want to deal with it, all of a sudden. He’s been trying and trying and if he tries right now, he knows he’ll just be frustrated and worse, he’ll be frustrated with his _dad_ , just like Lydia was a second ago, and he…he doesn’t want to see where that goes.

So instead he tells Lydia—and Derek, who’s been lurking around since Stiles walked in—about the stalker. “Do you think he’s some weird kind of groupie?” he finishes. “Like a Manson girl?”

Lydia makes a thinking noise. Derek comes into the room, pauses, and then sits down on the couch by Stiles. “He knew your name?” Derek says.

“Um, yeah, I know, right?” Stiles says.

Derek hunches up and presses his hand to the side of his face. “He kind of sounds like my uncle,” he says.

“What,” Stiles and Lydia say. 

Lydia recovers first and jabs her finger at him. “You said you didn’t have—you didn’t have _pack_ , let alone _family_ , coming after you.”

“Well, because I didn’t. I don’t,” Derek says, looking annoyed. “We broke up.”

Stiles pinches the bridge of his nose. “Derek, listen, I am sort of used to your ambiguous use of the English language at this point, but I’m just not in the mood tonight and what the fuck. What. The. Fuck. You broke up.”

So Derek explains that when his family massacre went down, his uncle Peter actually saved his ass, and they were an alpha-less twofer for a while, except Peter is apparently an asshole to everyone. Also, Derek was semi-responsible for the massacre and when Peter eventually found out, they had a fight and split up and that was indirectly the cause of Derek landing in that basement in the first place. Because Peter told him he’d better leave because he’s the one who didn’t understand what was so bad about Peter _not knowing_ the real reason it’d happened, who thought the fact that the hunters had all died too actually canceled things out. So Derek had his head in his ass, trying to figure that out, when the other hunters snatched him.

The next time Peter shows up, ordering a muffin top and a latte at a coffeeshop, Stiles sidles up and sticks a gun in Peter’s side, and walks him to a nice, quiet part of the parking lot where Stiles can tape his hands behind his back and shove him into the back of an SUV. And then they sit and Stiles eats Peter’s muffin top and they talk.

“Just so you know, _Peter_ , if you wanted to hire us, there is literally, literally, nobody left to go after. We checked when Derek showed up,” Stiles says, and then he frowns. “Unless you mean Derek.”

Peter shifts a little sharply from what Stiles belatedly realizes was a relieved sag into an annoyed upwards jerk. “My nephew is honestly _not_ the pack member I would’ve liked to have left, but that’s what he is,” he says sharply.

“He actually says you two broke up and you’re not pack,” Stiles says.

“That’s because he’s an idiot,” Peter says, rolling his eyes.

Stiles eats more of the muffin top, which makes Peter’s eyes drift to his mouth, and not entirely in a flirtatious way. It is a pretty good muffin. “So…you were tracking him down?”

“No,” Peter says. Then he smiles charmingly. “You, actually.”

After a second, Stiles picks up Peter’s coffee and pushes up the tab in the lid and then drinks half of it, slowly, looking right at Peter. The expression on Peter’s face is a weird mix of genuine appreciation (both of the physical and mindgaming aspects), longing (for Stiles and for the coffee, if Stiles is reading that right), and a fairly strong desire to get out of the tape and slap the coffee out of Stiles’ hand.

“So let me get this straight,” Stiles says, lowering the cup. “You’re following me around to what, ask me out?”

“I’m not entirely sure when you’re planning on striking—I know it’s this week, but can’t decide between Wednesday and Thursday—but I have tickets to Friday’s premiere of the new Deadpool movie,” Peter says.

Stiles crams what’s left of the muffin into his mouth and then chugs the coffee on top of it. And then he knocks Peter out, and drops him on the sidewalk and drives back to fuck Derek till they’re a boneless heap on the bed.

“Your uncle fights so dirty mud would be ashamed,” Stiles mutters.

Derek sighs. “Yeah. I know.”

“…he says you’re still pack,” Stiles eventually adds, because…because he doesn’t know, honestly, but whatever his dad is worrying about, it can’t be that they don’t know wrong from wrong. They have too many dead people constantly telling them for that.

So Derek pulls his head up and he’s surprised, really surprised, traded in the stoic jaw for big dark wondering eyes, and when Stiles looks at him, Stiles feels a sudden warmth in his chest that is both pleasant and deeply uncomfortable at the same time.

“I think I kind of get what he was getting at now,” Derek abruptly mutters. “But I don’t think that’s what he’s doing here.”

“Oh, no, he’s here because he wants to date me,” Stiles blurts out.

Derek thinks about that. Stiles has learned to read those shades of expressionlessness now, and Derek thinks that over and fully comprehends the meaning of what Stiles is saying. “Did he let you eat his food yet?” he asks.

“What, I just said—and your response is to—and oh, my God, he _did_ ,” Stiles yelps. “That—that _asshole_.”

“Yeah,” Derek winces. “Yeah, I know. It’s just…”

“Just what, are you…are you…” Stiles attempts to find a wording that does not scream high school teenage drama.

Derek considers him again. “Do you want me to be mad at him for that?”

“I am not having this level of passive-aggressiveness when I am still _in_ you,” Stiles says, dropping his face into Derek’s back. “Fine. Jesus. I will deal with your stupid uncle, for both of us.”

* * *

Werewolves notwithstanding, sometimes Derek and Peter forget that other people can have mad eavesdropping skillz, too.

“Can you not get her mad too?” Derek mutters, against the background of Kali and Erica snarling at each other. “She already doesn’t like us.”

“She doesn’t like _me_ ,” Peter says. “She doesn’t think you have enough of a personality to bother reacting against.”

Stiles hands Lydia a pack of sponges, the kind that come pre-soaked with cleanser. “He knows you so well.”

Lydia checks over the pack, then frowns and turns it around. She pokes at the plastic wrapper, then shows Stiles where the plastic’s started to split. The sponges inside still look okay to Stiles, but she tosses them back into the SUV and then waits till he sighs and crawls inside and gets a fresh, unsplit pack.

“He still hasn’t said a word about why,” she says, just before yanking the package apart.

She doesn’t mean Peter. Sponges rip out of the plastic like she’s hit the aorta. Most of them fall into the bucket at their feet, but one hits the bucket rim and is falling to the floor when Stiles grabs it. “Do we want to dig into this?” he says after a moment. “He’s not even here yet, Lyds, honestly, can I just get to see my dad and—”

“Yes, by all means, see him. He’s your father, Stiles, you’re legally permitted to see him any time and anywhere right up to _in extremis_ ,” Lydia snaps, snatching up the bucket.

It bangs against Stiles’ shin, but his curse and hop-skip away is completely covered up by the smack of her heels across the concrete. She stalks through the grungy garage, expensive handmade, silk-covered shoes cutting wakes through the oil-sheened pools, battered puke-green bucket swinging alongside her skirt.

When she reaches the pipes where they’d had Kali chained up, she slams down the bucket and then gets down on one knee. Her skirt hem lies on the floor for a good ten seconds before she sweeps it back onto her calf, and she doesn’t even look to see the blackish edging it’s already collected. She reaches into the bucket and takes out a sponge, squeezing it till the suds run up between her fingers and down the back of her hand, and then bends down to scrub it against a bloodstained pipe without pushing back the filmy, virginally white sleeves of her blouse.

Kali’s voice suddenly rises up into an alpha roar, but it’s thin, no heart to it, and it’s no surprise when the roar collapses well before reaching its peak. In the lull—it’s not silent, it’s never really silent when they’re putting someone before the dead—Stiles can hear somebody in the next room cracking their knuckles.

“ _Must_ you do that?” Peter suddenly says. He’s aggravated to the point of menace, his voice riding roughshod over a short, stuttering series of sobs.

“Don’t start,” Derek says. “I didn’t say anything when you came sniffing after Stiles, as if this was just another one of your—”

“Do you really think that,” Peter says, flat as the side of a razor. “Do you really, nephew, when—”

“Hey, you guys, do you want to take your relationship counseling outside?” Erica says. “You know, so you’re not bitching about how it’s not going well in front of a whole bunch of people who no longer get to _have_ relationship problems because they were _massacred_ so this _bitch_ here could impress her boyfriend—”

Stiles shuts off the eavesdropping spell, just as Lydia starts to push her sleeve up. It’s not silent. The walls still let through the occasional wail from Kali, and they’re never going to keep out the constant, skin-crawling susurration of restless dead. He could put up another spell and make it quiet, but he doesn’t do that, and so the scuff of his shoes mixes with the hissing of the dead and the long, brittle sigh that Lydia lets out, lifting her head, pulling her fingers off her sleeve and leaving behind dark red smears from the blood and rustier ones from the flaking paint on the pipes.

“Don’t do that,” Stiles says quietly. “Lyds—just—it’s a mess already, do you have to—”

“I didn’t mean—”

“He loves you too,” Stiles says. He stops and she moves her head and her arm, and he thinks he sees annoyance in it, and his temper suddenly spikes. “He did whatever you wanted, okay, that’s why he never was your dad, because you went and gave him that whole speech and he _respected_ that, so why you’re acting like—”

“If I didn’t know that, do you think I’d be acting like this?” Lydia whirls on him, going up onto her heels. One of them catches the end of her skirt and her hand shoots down to maintain her balance and she makes it look like the point of her stiletto-vicious movement. “Do you think I know what to do any better just because he texts _me_ with the logistics?”

She glares at him. Her clothes don’t ruck up or twist around her, that’s how perfectly they’re tailored, but they have those soiled spots now. And she’s not a werewolf, but she’s not human either and sometimes that shows at the edges, just like how the dirty finger-marks show up how crisp the rest of her outfit is. A little too much red in her hair, making it look like dripping blood. The slight bluish shade to her glower, like a werewolf glow but not quite.

“No,” Stiles says. He raises his hand, then pulls it back. “No, I just—I was…I don’t know, hoping you…I just, Lydia, I don’t know…just because he’s my _dad_ doesn’t mean—I don’t know what the hell we did any better than you do.”

Lydia keeps looking at him. She knew that, says her look. She’s disappointed in him, it also says. And she’s frustrated and sympathetic and nervous and goddamn it, Stiles, you know he lied like a lying liar when he said it wasn’t us so why do we keep acting like it doesn’t bother us? Why do _you_ keep letting me do that? Why you?

Stiles can’t take it anymore and he turns around and walks out. He thinks he hears Lydia call after him, but he pretends it doesn’t happen and keeps walking.

Kali’s in the middle of an agonized snarl, her limbs working out the last aftershocks of a fierce spasming attack. Erica turns with taser in hand and says something about her trying to claw out her own throat; Stiles waves her on and keeps going, swinging away when Derek gets up from his corner.

Peter’s no longer with them. He’s not in the driveway either. And when Stiles pops up the back of the rental car and then pulls himself up to sit with his legs hanging over the bumper, Peter isn’t squatting at the other end with a knowing smirk on his face. Stiles heaves out a breath and flops backwards, and there’s no Peter hovering over him. There’s just the SUV ceiling.

And, a few seconds later, the discreet whiff of coffee. When Stiles tilts his head up, the view out the back of the car still just shows a concrete wall. He drums his fingers, then snorts and puts his head back down, folding his arm under it. “Relax, you’re not going anywhere.”

“Derek’s not actually as passive as he likes to make people think,” Peter says conversationally. He’s not visible through the windows either, so he must be squeezing himself against the bit of car where the rear side window ends and before the rear door starts. “When he realized I was tracking you, he tracked me down for a little talk.”

“Is it supposed to make me feel better that not only is my relationship with my father so fucked up that I have a nervous breakdown when he comes _back_ , but my stress relief kinky werewolf booty calls are, actually, way more complicated than that?” Stiles says. “Also? Not news.”

Peter sighs. “Stiles, if I thought you’d believe me, I’d point out that in my honest opinion, I don’t think your father has the slightest idea what you and Lydia are feeling right now.”

“If you were actually honest about your opinions, you wouldn’t have to backdoor them with a passive-aggressive move like that, and yeah, Peter, I’ve always known you were bigger on those than Derek,” Stiles says. He feels his hand clench and unclench against the side of his head. “Again, duh. If he knew, he wouldn’t ever come back.”

“If he’d known, I think we both know he would have come back sooner,” Peter says, a little curtly.

So Stiles is being more than a little unfair on Peter. The degree of passive-aggressiveness is one thing, but context is everything, as they say, and Derek’s act is playground-level because Derek’s instinctive about it. He just pulls that shit because he literally doesn’t want to put the thought into it. Peter, on the other hand, puts so much thought into it that sometimes he doesn’t even notice the gazillion miles of freefall over which he’s setting up his highwire act. If Peter’s passive-aggressive, it’s because in reality, he’s a huge adrenaline junkie and he can’t help betting on the longest odds.

So Peter lets it go silent and lets the tension build, because he’s trying to pull something off, and Stiles is…half-tempted to let it ride. Just do their usual routine, let Peter twist at his temper till something snaps and they fuck it out. Because he’s not above a little passive-aggressiveness himself.

“Why do you even care?” Stiles asks instead. “I’m keeping you around whatever my dad does. And it’s not like Lydia and I are going to stop working either. Whatever—whatever problems Dad has with it, if he really, really thought we weren’t doing it right, then he would’ve…well, he wouldn’t have just left.”

“In your own words, and yet,” Peter says. He’s sighing a little, covering up relief and other soft-belly emotions with a patronizing air.

This time, Stiles pushes himself up. He half-hears, half-glimpses Peter starting, and then blocks off his blurry view of the man by rubbing his hand over that side of his face. “Answer the question, would you?”

Peter doesn’t do that. Not for a few minutes, anyway, which he spends just breathing and standing there, just out of sight but nowhere near out of feeling. And then he inhales, slow and edgy, and when Stiles pulls his hand down, Peter’s standing dead-center in front of him. Gripping the top of the car and looking like he’s barely hanging onto it with his fingertips, for all that he’s looming over Stiles that way, very much over the line in werewolf terms.

“Do you honestly think we’re here just to get fucked and watch you torture people?” he says, low and hard. “We’re neither of us _that_ pathetic, despite Derek’s best efforts.”

“Yeah, well,” Stiles starts.

Peter lets go of the top and jerks inside and on top of Stiles. He’s snarling even as Stiles grabs the side, then the back of his neck, jams a taser up against his ribs. Snarling, but his teeth aren’t showing and that must register on a subconscious level because Stiles doesn’t pull the trigger. Doesn’t think about that either, just acts: rolls them over and lets the taser fall out of his hand because he’s using that to push Peter’s knee out of the way. He hikes his own knees up to either side of Peter’s waist, straddling down as Peter lunges up and catches his mouth, kisses him with the deep violence of the desperate. 

That snarl of Peter’s vibrates down Stiles’ throat and into his gut, where it gets stuck and seems to double over and over on itself, building up till he’s snarling back. Louder, longer, and then his snarl is the only snarl as they twist around each other. Stiles’ hands end up in Peter’s hair, and he can feel Peter’s hands graze at his hips and thighs before thumping down to claw at the floor on either side of them.

He yanks himself off. Looks down at Peter, at the man panting under him, looking up as if Stiles might—might _vanish_ on him, as if the one thing they _all_ know isn’t that Stiles, of all people, is never going.

“I told Derek back then,” Peter says. He stops, his eyes flicking repeatedly over Stiles’ face. He only relaxes when Stiles twists at his hair. “I told him I wasn’t here to avenge our family. It’s the only reason that would have kept him from objecting, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

“It’d be easier,” Stiles says, as his anger flares, dies, crumbles into nothing. He pulls one hand out of Peter’s hair and presses at his face again. “Damn it. It would, but…”

“You’ll have your father back,” Peter says after a second, very quietly. “You know that, don’t you? No matter what, he’ll be back.”

“Yeah,” Stiles says. He pulls his hand off his face and lets it fall wherever. Which happens to be semi-on Peter’s chin. He lets it lie there, then moves his thumb. Grazes it across Peter’s lip and Peter almost closes his eyes and then Stiles gets off him. “Yeah. Sure. I know that.”

* * *

Basically, Peter is insane.

He shows up again, in a target’s office while the target is actually there, and Stiles ends up taking him hostage. Which is basically counterproposing about the date location, but Stiles actually isn’t that big on the movie because he hated that arc in the comics, he doesn’t mind a little extreme car chase action with the target’s henchmen and he’s pretty sure Peter enjoys some hard, shuddering engine action himself. Maybe not so much when Peter’s tied up and bouncing around the back of Stiles’ rental SUV along with two duffel bags full of heavy items that have lots of pointy bits, but first dates are usually messy.

Stiles finally gets those henchmen off their ass, courtesy of a waterfront parking garage and an understanding with the local croc people community, and then he drives around the block and gets them into a nice, secure garage. _Then_ he climbs into the back and shoves Peter down under him, sitting hard on Peter’s belly.

“What the hell, do you think I really wouldn’t shoot your face for screwing up a job?” Stiles snaps.

Peter grunts and twists some, because it’s probably very uncomfortable with his hands taped behind him and all his plus Stiles’ weight grinding those into the rubber floor. “Well, Stiles,” he mutters, his usual smiling aplomb looking a little rough around the edges. “You haven’t done that yet, have you?”

Stiles brings his gun around and points it in Peter’s face. Peter looks over the muzzle, at him, and watches him make increasingly frustrated noises before finally just tossing the gun aside and seizing Peter by the front of the shirt-collar and slamming his head into the floor. _No_ , Stiles’ dad keeps saying, no, they don’t kill extras. They don’t. They don’t do this for _fun_ , after all.

“Okay, fine, you really want to fuck that bad,” Stiles says, dragging Peter back up by collar and tie.

Peter’s moaning before their mouths even crash together. He’s a lot less finesse than Stiles was expecting, what with the slick act, all blunt heat and willingness to take a bite if it’ll get him two more seconds of pressure. Which is right up Stiles’ alley, however much he tries for his father, and in another couple minutes he’s pushed right on top of Peter, from hips up to the hands he’s got knotted in Peter’s hair. They’re rubbing off against each other and Peter’s breath catches every time that Stiles’ belly slides his belt buckle down into his erection, and it’s crazy and frantic and it’s _still_ not even close to burning down the car chase high.

Stiles yanks his hands out of Peter’s hair and slaps himself semi-upright. Peter stares up at him, panting openmouthed, hair pulled straight back into a loose crest that’s already collapsing sideways under the weight of sweat-sodden curls. The man’s eyes are bright, bright and wild, like foxfire dancing over a fresh grave, and then he hooks Stiles’ gaze, good and deep, and presses his shoulders down and tilts his chin up and sways his hips up into Stiles’ ass, running his erection right between the buttocks.

“Fuck,” Stiles says, and then he shakes his head and plants his hand right over Peter’s fly. He digs down with his nails, puts all his weight on Peter’s cock as Peter hisses and squirms, as he hikes himself up onto his knees and jerks his fly open. “Jesus, you asshole, you should know, by the way, just in case this is—some family feud bullshit between you and Derek—”

“It’s not,” Peter gasps. He jerks his feet apart, then tries to pull up his knees into Stiles’ back and knock Stiles forward. “You don’t do living feuds, why on earth would I—would I bother you with something—something like—”

“I don’t know, ‘cause you’re fucked up?” Stiles says, wiggling his jeans down to mid-thigh. He can’t get them down any farther without getting off Peter, or—yeah, not getting off the guy.

Flipping him, grabbing an arm and a shoulder, and then both of Peter’s forearms, dragging him back as he slides forward on his belly. Peter grunts, knees inching up again, and Stiles lets him get his groin off the floor, moving back to sit on Peter’s calves as he pulls out his knife and slits open the seat of Peter’s trousers, right down the center. So they peel back as Peter humps himself, easy as an overripe fruit splitting its skin, and under the dark cloth are a pair of perfect, pale buttocks nestling a little, rubbery, kind of convex black button between them.

Stiles pushes the button because that’s what he does, if you really boil it down to basics, and Peter bangs his own face against the floor, groaning, wrenching his arms against his back. His hands are good and mummified in the magicked tape, right up to the fingertips, and when he tries to fist them, he can only manage to bend the fingers at right angles to the palms. The tips end up flirting with the cut edges of his trousers as he rocks his ass back on Stiles, fucking onto the plug, or dildo, or whatever the hell he stuck in himself.

“Somebody thought they knew what was going down,” Stiles says, half-admiring because yeah, it’s fucked-up but also it’s just—damn. “And I thought Derek pushed it.”

Peter doesn’t even trade quips. He just rolls his hips back, plumps that ass in Stiles’ face, and just beyond it, Stiles can see his face where he’s got it pressed into the floor. So hard that the traction ridges are leaving marks across his cheek, they show whenever Peter sways, smears of angry pink. And Peter’s eyes, they’re glazed over, their blue greyed out compared to the hot flush of his face, the red-black shading inside his open mouth. He maybe catches Stiles’ eye again, or maybe just has his eye rolling that way anyway, and then his tongue flicks out between his fangs and he twists his head a little and suddenly he’s biting the rubber mat. White teeth sinking into black, lips pulling down over them to suck noisily.

Stiles pulls the plug from Peter’s ass and fucks him. On his belly, his tape-flipper hands pattering against the bottom of Stiles’ ribs, both hands gripping his shoulders to rock his whole body, not just his ass, back onto Stiles’ cock. And Peter takes it like it’s water and he’s on his third day of drought, arching his back and showing his throat and whining like every fuck of Stiles’ cock is cramming down his air.

He squirms with it, even after Stiles has come. He makes Stiles get hard again just from that, from the hitch of his ass and the strain of his shoulderblades up through the back of his dress shirt. Making more noises, little gutted noises, deep one second and then thin and mewling the next. As Stiles’ cock swells in him, he starts digging his knees into the floor, like he’s trying to brace himself and get up. Stiles grabs his forearms, then his ass, shoving him back down and as he hits, the _car_ rattles.

Peter twists himself on Stiles’ cock like a speared fish, a strange, not-quite-laughing noise pulling out of him. He turns his head and there’s some blood smeared over his chin where the skin had split under the pressure. “Can’t I just want a decent fuck?” he pants.

“Sure,” Stiles says, reaching down. He dabbles his fingers in the blood, as Peter lifts his chin for it, eyes closing and soft sighing sounds coming out of him, then pulls them back down Peter’s neck. Leaves the tendon and the artery marked out with fading, sticky red. “Guy like you, survived a massacre, I’m pretty sure you can find whatever kind of fuck you want.”

“Oh,” Peter says, jerking a little. He looks disoriented for a second, blinking rapidly, and then he’s off his game and knowing it, and surprisingly obvious about how much he hates himself for it. “Right, that, I suppose Derek—”

Stiles makes an incredulous noise. Then puts his hands over Peter’s shoulderblades and hikes himself, then lets his weight and the clutch of Peter’s ass rock them out of the thrust. The blood on his fingers mixes with the sweat in Peter’s shirt to fade to pinkish before it ever has a chance to be bright. “‘That’?”

“They’re all dead,” Peter says after a second, with a little edge in his voice. “Didn’t he tell you?”

“Yeah, he told us. Told us they were all taken care of, no nemesis business whatsoever, it’s just strictly he feels like hanging around and has nobody to tell him different,” Stiles says. He fucks into Peter again, deeper, holding himself there so he can see how his balls indent Peter’s buttocks. “So what?”

“Well,” Peter says, and he makes it a long, low, slow sigh. His back and hips shudder; his wet shirt pulls away from his skin and then drapes back down, the dim shadows where it’s not stuck changing like ink swirling in water. “I wasn’t planning to be that person, for him. If that’s what you were thinking.”

Stiles looks at him, at the blood that can’t dry against his neck because his sweat’s washing it off too quick, at the curve of his throat he’s offering up even as his knees rattle, the endpoint for the spasms overtaking his thighs. He can’t hold himself up any longer and he goes flat as Stiles presses into him, flat and limp, little whimpers shaking out every time Stiles kneads his buttocks.

So Stiles fucks him a second time. The blood’s almost gone by the time Stiles pushes himself up from that, and when Stiles hauls Peter over, his hand slides up from Peter’s shoulder to neck and takes care of the rest of it. Just bare throat, when Stiles works his semi-softened cock back into Peter, bare but for the sweat slicking it, stretched out with a lolling head at its end.

Peter’s all wet inside the front of his pants. Stiles pulls open his belt, peels away the sides of his fly and then sticks his hand in, massages it around in the come and sweat as Peter twitches and heaves his chest and shoulders and groans. “You planning to stick around?” Stiles asks.

“The alternative,” Peter mutters. His thighs sprawl out to either side of him. He can’t get them all the way against the floor, he’s not that flexible, but he keeps trying even though he’s so tired he can’t be bothered to flip the hair out of his eyes. “Keep doing this?”

“What, you aren’t having fun?” Stiles says, with both hands cupped around Peter’s balls.

He squeezes, just a little, and Peter’s sodden hair slaps about as Peter twists his head back and forth, hissing. Stiles loosens up and Peter pants so hard, pushing up against his shirt, that Stiles ends up reaching up and pulling loose the buttons and it’s like he’s tugged off a corset, from how Peter’s blowing his air.

“I’d rather,” Peter grunts. Stops when Stiles leans over him, propping up a forearm against his chest, and wraps one hand around his throat. But his eyes tick over, fixing on Stiles, and they’re still madness-bright, bright as the sun and twice as hungry to burn.

They make Stiles feel like—like his skin doesn’t fit right. No, not that, like his skin…like it’s peeling on him, old and dried and too tight anyway, and like something underneath, something new and not quite ready but _almost_ , it’s quiet and flexing and waiting.

“What,” Stiles says. Suddenly it’s not fun, or funny. It’s something he needs to settle, right now, before he goes and loses it. “What are you after, already? And don’t say it’s me, okay?”

“It’s not,” Peter says. He looks up at Stiles, over the hand gripping his throat, and then he smiles like he’s just seen the sun, of all things. “But I do want to see—I want to see when it happens, Stiles. I’m as clear as Derek—clearer, if anything, since I worked at that. I won’t bring anything you can’t use. Just give me a front row seat, that’s all I want.”

“And no more sex?” Stiles says.

Peter moves his head a little, lets his smile go conspiratorial. “Well, it’s not a requirement, but it does seem to be a pleasure, doesn’t it?”

“That’s not why we do it,” Stiles automatically says.

“You do it for whatever reason you want,” Peter says. “Put down whatever rules you like. I’ll follow. Just let me come.”

That sounds—familiar, but before Stiles can place the memory, Peter flexes himself, his throat in Stiles’ hand, his ass around Stiles’ cock. Stiles loses the thought, and just falls back on what comes natural, as Peter’s hard cock slips out of his opened trousers and rubs up against Stiles’ belly, and Peter jerks under him again, much more urgently. Just leans over, twisting Peter’s chin to the side, and bites into the man’s throat.

So yeah, Peter gets to come along. He’s crazy, but he’s Stiles’ now, and Stiles told his father he’d look after anything he did.

* * *

Once the ghosts are done, Lydia takes care of Kali, and then says she’s taking the clean-up on top of that. She and Stiles don’t shank each other, but she normally doesn’t volunteer herself.

“I think I pissed her off,” Erica says as they walk down the hotel hallway. She’s more tired than she was after Ennis. She’s gotten more sleep and food but she’s feeling the death more; Stiles can tell from the loose, jangly way she moves, like she’s not ignoring where it hurts so much as just not feeling it, the signals lying down and dying before they get there. “I was asking her if you ever cut it off early?”

“Why would you ask that?” Derek says, clearly disgusted _he_ even needs to ask that.

Peter is ignoring them because Peter is walking ahead, talking on his phone to some people who may have the whereabouts of Deucalion for sale. He gets to their door and then goes past it, into a little alcove area, and then turns around to watch as Stiles comes up to the door and takes out the keycard and freezes.

“Because,” Erica says, jutting her chin at Derek. Then she backs off, tousling her hair for cover. “I don’t know, because Boyd’s still Boyd, so far as I can tell, so if dead people are basically like how they were when they were alive, just with a lot more time to catch up on getting fucked over, then don’t you ever wonder—”

“No,” Derek says, putting an emphatic period in the word. But he’s not really paying attention to her; he and Peter are both tense and still and looking at Stiles.

They haven’t heard anything, since they didn’t say anything before. There wasn’t a message at the desk. The magic does what it should when Stiles triggers the wards, but Stiles just knows. Before he sticks in the keycard and swings open the door, before he looks into the room and sees the shoes propped up on the desk, old worn military boots, and the freshly-polished dress shoe sitting next to them. He knows.

“Hey, Dad,” he says.

His dad’s already getting up, putting the other, half-polished dress shoe down on the desk and coming across the room. “Stiles,” he says, a little uncomfortable. He’s always a little bit tight when they first see each other. “Hey. Caught you coming back?”

“Yeah, Lydia’s doing it,” Stiles says. Then he remembers, and he steps back and turns sideways so his dad can see the people in the hall.

Peter’s still on the phone and he dips his head a little as he pivots off the wall to where Stiles’ father can see him. Derek’s a little too far out and Peter reaches over and grabs his elbow and tugs him into view; Derek mostly avoids Stiles’ dad’s eyes, as usual. And Erica’s squarely in front of Stiles’ dad but she hangs back, her hands gathered up against her hips like she wants to hide them in her pockets. She keeps her head up to look but doesn’t make any effort to be friendly.

“That’s Erica,” Stiles says.

Stiles’ dad looks her over. He has a way of doing that, really quiet and nonthreatening, and Stiles can tell that that bothers Erica. She frowns a little, shifting from foot to foot, and then she hitches up her shoulder as a cool breeze goes across all of them.

“That’s Boyd, my friend,” Erica says. “Well, you knew that, right?”

“I still try and be polite when I can. It’s better manners to be introduced,” Stiles’ father says, with a slight nod. He moves a little, like he’s going to turn towards Stiles, and catches himself and flicks an absent hand at his leg. He’s in dress shirt and trousers, so crisp that the creases could julienne butter, but he’s not really wearing them yet, still holding himself like he thinks there should be an extra inch of give. “You all right with them?”

Erica blinks because she thought she was done too. Then she looks at Derek and Peter. “What, them? Like the whole werewo—well, we’re okay. I mean, I can kick off to my room if you all need private time, and it’s not like I’m gonna be _rude_ and call Derek out for some bullshit dominance whatever.”

“I need to go out soon anyway,” Peter says, finally lowering his phone. “Offer on the table, Blackwood.”

He says that to Stiles, very deliberately, and Stiles shrugs and looks to his dad, just as deliberately. “Welcome back dinner?”

“Sounds good,” his dad says. “You try the restaurant here yet?”

Stiles shrugs again, backing out of the room as his dad walks towards him. By the time the man gets into the hall, he’s moving as comfortable as any runway model. Nice clothes, shit shoes, and he swings his arm up to lay his hand on Stiles’ shoulder and it just seems like they should head on back to the elevator. For a moment, it’s just that kind of right.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _The Losers_ reference/off-screen cameo, yes. Aisha's a nemesis too, though she didn't spontaneously get that status.


	4. Chapter 4

Stiles’ father does not ask if Peter is all right. Stiles’ father gives Peter a long, unblinking look as Peter walks in and tells Lydia the new haircut she got a week ago looks lovely, and sighs at a stonefaced Derek, and then goes over and carefully inserts his wrinkled, dirty, smelly suit (because he talked Stiles into grabbing his luggage along the way) into their waste bag.

Then Peter looks up and Stiles gets to see how thin Peter’s composure can get before it cracks. “I was hearing about what you were doing before my nephew ran into Stiles here,” Peter says after a long silence. “Word gets around.”

“Yeah, it would,” Stiles’ dad says. He’s standing over an open box, holding onto one of the many metal pieces carefully packed into that box. His fingers move along the steel and a stray foam peanut falls off. “So who are you?”

Stiles raises his hand, almost says—but Peter’s already introducing himself. Tells Stiles’ father his name, his family, gives a version of how they all got killed and how he and Derek escaped that’s abbreviated compared to Derek’s version, and Derek could do his via Twitter and still have plenty of room for a catchy tagline. He pauses, then goes into what he’s been doing since then.

It’s not all flattering. He’s more honest than Stiles would’ve expected—than Derek was either, judging by how Derek’s eyes widen and then Derek flips a chair around and plops his ass in it to listen. And Peter’s a little flat about it—his voice is. At some points he sounds like he’s reading off a script, or maybe a casualty list. He doesn’t go into showy detail.

He’s probably leaving off things, no matter what he says about clearing up his own messes, but Stiles’ father doesn’t ask any questions except for that first one. And one more, at the very end, after Peter’s started to show the strain, to struggle a bit to figure out where to wrap.

“Who’d you hear about us from?” Stiles’ dad says.

Peter opens his mouth, closes it halfway, and then makes a noise like he wants to sigh, but he thinks that’d come off too flippant when what he looks like, is he looks nervous. He doesn’t seem to move but he does something that gets Derek’s attention, makes Derek shift forward like he might just cover Peter if Peter backed up a little.

“You’re in the air,” Peter finally says. He grimaces a smile like he knows how New Age stupid that sounds. “Everyone knows—ask any banshee, present company aside. Or anyone who knows about them. They’ll say, you and your son, you’re—”

“Yeah, well, guess I should’ve figured it was something like that,” Stiles’ dad snorts, turning around.

Stiles knows that signal well enough, and he hustles Peter out of there. Derek follows, of course, and he’s feeling comfortable enough to snipe at Peter for not mentioning the banshee thing to him, to which Peter points out that Derek wasn’t exactly returning his calls. They’re still bickering when Stiles backs out, finds Lydia where he was expecting her, and spreads his hands.

“I know, I have no idea, but I—” he starts.

“Forget your werewolf sexcapades for one second,” Lydia says. “What’s in the air? What does that mean?”

Stiles looks at her. “I don’t know,” he says after a moment. “I really don’t.”

* * *

The hotel actually has multiple restaurants. They check into one that’s between their suites and the lobby, but it’s more of a bar, so they head all the way down and then go into the one that’s got a menu most like a standard steakhouse. No point in making this more complicated than it is.

“So, I know I didn’t give you all much notice,” his dad eventually starts, after the bread basket and before their entrées arrive. He fiddles with the silverware, shoulders hunching so his suit looks like it doesn’t fit again. “Guessing that’s why Lydia decided to be out.”

“Did you text her that you were here?” Stiles asks. He honestly won’t be offended if his father says yes. They’re a nonstandard family, okay, but they are family and he and Lydia are different and his dad is a bright guy for realizing that and tailoring his approach accordingly.

“No, but I figured you would,” his father says, frowning. He straightens up, putting the fork down, and then leans back against the booth. “Did you—”

Stiles waves his hand. “Yeah, no, I did in the elevator, and she hasn’t buzzed back. So why are you back?”

He—didn’t mean to just jump into the deep end, it’s just how his life always seems to operate. He flinches as his dad lifts his head, then presses his hands flat against his knees under the table.

“S—k—Sti—goddamn it,” his dad stutters and then swears. Jerks his head to the side and glowers at the far end of the room, till a nervous waiter tiptoes over, and then he sighs and pulls his head back around, waves off the waiter. “Stiles, you know I didn’t leave because of you or her, or anything you were doing, right?”

“Yeah,” Stiles says. “Yeah, I know, I distinctly remember you saying that about fifty zillion times between now and then. You pretty much greeted me with that whenever we came down to the—hey, so are you selling off the farm?”

His father, being his father, gives him a long, considering look that cuts through all the bullshit and is doubly skeptical about the attempted change in conversation. “Forget the farm,” he says, so that Stiles goes from feeling shady to downright ashamed of his verbal runaround. “Listen, I’m sorry about leaving.”

And then they both feel shitty. Stiles’ father obviously has been mulling this over for a while, that’s clear just from how his eyes start to drop from Stiles’ face before he catches himself, and watching him stew like that makes Stiles hate himself for—for not doing whatever the hell he needed to _before_ it got to his dad and drove him off.

“You said you needed to,” Stiles finally says.

“Yeah. Yeah, and I did. I don’t think I was ever going to get things straight otherwise, but I know it came out of the blue and I know it wasn’t easy on you two, and I’m just—I’m sorry it ended up that way,” his father says. He struggles but his eyes stay on Stiles, even as his hand inches onto the table and then starts fidgeting with a butter knife. “I’m not ashamed of what we’ve done.”

“Well, if you weren’t, then why didn’t you say anything?” Stiles suddenly snaps. “Why’d you let it get so far? Why didn’t you just _tell_ —” 

His father doesn’t move but his father doesn’t have to move to make things happen, to change the air, pull the threat of thunder and lightning out of a cloudless sky. “Because there wasn’t anything to tell up till that point, Stiles,” he says roughly.

The knife abruptly flips from his fingers, slaps across his bread plate, and then skitters off onto the table. It almost falls off and neither of them look at it, not till Stiles’ father sighs and swings his thumb out to push it to safety. Then he glances at it, checking that he’s sliding it back in line with his plate and glass.

“There wasn’t,” he says again, more softly. “I guess I can see why you and Lydia might’ve thought…but it’s always been hard for me, working things out. You two can jump from thought to thought but I have to go slower, thinking about what we do. But that’s not why I left, Stiles. Why—I just was standing there, you remember. And I realized that this really could go on forever.”

“I remember,” Stiles says after a long few seconds. “I remember that—”

Some busboy who lost the bet carries out their entrées. He’s smart enough to not go through the usual spiel these places have about what food is what, and just sets down their plates and then quicksteps away from there. Stiles doesn’t touch his; his father slices into the center of his steak and checks the color, then puts down the knife and fork.

“I think you’ve both forgotten, and it’s probably better for you that way, but I didn’t get into this till late,” Stiles’ father says. “I had a whole life before we started on this one.”

“I wasn’t that young when Mom died,” Stiles says, his temper flaring up. “Yeah, so you were sheriff, and had a bunch of cold cases, and even when they weren’t cold, you usually never knew what really happened when somebody got killed. And you didn’t know anything about the supernatural.”

“And I like knowing what the hell is going on,” his dad says, looking right back at him, steady and strong, till Stiles flushes and drops his gaze. His dad breathes in a little slowly. “It’s _not_ that I could take back what I’ve already done—damn it, Stiles, if there was one thing I thought I got through your head, I thought it’d be that—”

“You did. You did, okay, you did, that and everything else, I heard every word whether or not you thought I was listening,” Stiles says, looking up again. “I heard, and Lydia heard, and we both—what you say _matters_ to us. So—so when you just—you just said you had to stop it—”

His father sighs. “I meant I needed to…Stiles, I started this because I thought it needed to be done, and nobody else was doing it. I never thought I’d be doing it because—because it was what I _was_. Because I was any goddamn good at it either. I just tried to do my best.”

So his dad’s said that last part a lot. Stiles is used to it, to his dad just pushing aside the compliments, not letting his head get inflated and getting in the way. But this time it just comes out different, or maybe Stiles hears it different—because Stiles hears everything that comes out of his dad’s mouth but yeah, okay, maybe it doesn’t always register the way it’s intended.

Anyway, his dad says that and looks at him and Stiles looks back and for the first time Stiles thinks that his father looks shocked. And his dad’s never shocked, not really, not since that woman told him to get to the hospital before his wife died and he decided to listen to her. It’s hard to be, with what they are, and besides, it’s his _dad_. His dad might be startled or surprised, but then he’s too busy rolling up his sleeves and trying to get to the bottom of it to be _shocked_.

“It’s just, ten goddamn years at it, Stiles,” his dad adds slowly. “Ten years of being in the trenches, and I figured I just get you two to the point where your brains aren’t getting ahead of your instincts and I’d be doing okay, and…”

“I wasn’t expecting it either,” Stiles blurts out. He winces even as he does, he can tell that his dad’s got more to say, but it just comes out. “Lydia wasn’t either. Honestly, the only one who had a clue was Peter, and even he said—”

“Yeah,” his dad says, with enough lingering irritation that Stiles also can’t help raising his brows. His dad shrugs. “I had a talk with him, the second time you all came down to the farm.”

Stiles mentally runs through the timeline of Peter’s reactions to his father. “That explains a lot.”

A flicker of amusement goes across his dad’s face. Then he shifts, picking up his fork again. His brow furrows, fading off the amusement, as he starts in on his side of roasted potatoes. “Look, it just…caught me by surprise, and the whole idea that—that I’m actually—that this is more than just what I do, and then that I could—it’s just that forever is a while, Stiles, especially when you get to my age. You think you’re going to retire and call it a day and then—”

“But you did do that,” Stiles says. “You were doing that.”

His father pauses with a potato chunk halfway up. He twists it back and forth, studying it. “Yeah. But it…it wasn’t clear that I could till I did, if that makes sense. I needed to see. If this was really something you could pick, or if it’s just something fate or magic or some asshole entity forces on you. And if so, if…if I was really picking it. This just…isn’t who I thought I’d be. And I am okay with that, actually, but it took a while for me to be okay with being okay with that. I don’t know if I’m explaining this right, but that’s what I was thinking when I was gone.”

Then he eats the potato. He doesn’t look like he’s really enjoying it, or disliking it, but he takes up his knife and cuts a few mouthfuls of steak, so Stiles tries the roast chicken he got. It’s okay. It’s not a dish that’s going to raise any inconvenient family memories and it’s bland so he’s not going to get distracted from thinking about what his dad said, even if he was trying.

“No, I get that,” Stiles finally says. “I mean, I don’t think Lyds and me—I don’t think we’ve ever thought we were doing this for any reason besides we _want_ to, so we wouldn’t have thought about it like that…but I guess that’s why you’re my dad, and not the other way around.”

His father smiles. It’s tight and lopsided, but it’s there. “Thanks for making it sound less selfish than it was, kid.”

“Hey, well, if I can drop sex toys all over your vintage car farm, I think I can give you this one,” Stiles says. And that little side-eye twitch of his father’s makes him curious, but…not yet, he’s not quite ready to let his mind drift. “Just…Dad, just…you weren’t ever going to…it wasn’t about wanting to die after all, was it?”

Right as he says that, he sticks food in his mouth. It’s so he doesn’t do something embarrassing like have his voice wobble, but the chewing ends up keeping him from realizing that his father’s stopped eating. When he looks, he looks up and his dad’s even gone so far as to lay down knife and fork, looking at Stiles with such fierce determination that he almost feels guilty for even checking.

“No,” his dad says. “Absolutely not. No—Stiles, hell, I _am_ your father, if it turned out we were being forced into it—”

“We would totally blow up whoever was responsible and slow-walk away, action movie style,” Stiles says, grinning at his father. “I know, I know, it’s just—we were worried, sorry.”

“Don’t say sorry about something like that, that just reminds me I did something right with you two,” his dad mutters, going back to his food.

And it’s like the ice not only cracked, but floated off to leave the stream running free and clear. They don’t talk much as they eat, but they don’t have to; they’re just that good with each other. It almost doesn’t matter that Stiles has only seen his father for a couple weeks a year for the last couple years, or that he has to drive deep into the northern California backwoods to do it, so far that the mutter of the dead dies down to nearly nothing and he goes a little crazy with the quiet and wonders how it doesn’t bother his father. Just put them together again and they know how to work.

Almost. “You’re gonna have to talk to Lyds separately, I think,” Stiles says. “I can prep her but—”

“No. No, I’ll do my own dirty work,” his father says, with a grimace at his plate.

Of course he does, and of course Stiles is going to grab Lydia and soften her edges first anyway. “So anyway, you’re _back_ back.”

“Unretired,” his father agrees, looking a little happy to change the subject. But just a little, and then he grimaces again and all that goes away. “Well, I should let you know, I don’t think I’ll be—it’s still not going to be like how we were running it before. Which is right anyway, you two have been handling it without me for long enough and I shouldn’t be coming in and taking over just because I used to run things.”

“Hey, Dad, listen, however you want to do it is cool,” Stiles says. On the one hand, he doesn’t like it when his father’s uncomfortable, but on the other, if they’re already going to that sort of detail, he is just so—relieved. So flat-out relieved, nothing else mixed into that, and God, he doesn’t want to ruin that already by trying to think things through. “You’re the original anyway, we’re just carrying on the family business, so if you figure you wanna open up a new line of services or whatever, that’s cool with us.”

His father takes a deep breath and Stiles stops, concerned, but…then his dad just lets that all out. Slow, steady, tension rolling out of him as Stiles watches. And he is happy to be back, he really is, and Stiles just tells himself that whatever brought his dad back is totally fine. Details don’t matter for something like this.

“Good, since I’ll admit it was a little…left of center,” his dad says. He pokes at some meat, then shifts back against the booth. “By the way, those toys you and Derek and Peter left the last time you visited, I brought up—”

“Oh, hey, um,” Stiles says, flushing. “Sorry about that, I could’ve sworn I actually got Derek to pick up after himself. I told him he forgets it, he loses it.”

His father pauses. “Well, okay, because I couldn’t find a one-to-one replacement for the vibrator anyway, so I just got you the latest version.”

Stiles makes squeaking noises till he caves and grabs his glass, and then he drinks to stop sounding like a flailing, constipated rat. “Dad, um, what?”

“I can’t give you back the old ones,” his father says, straight-faced. “House rules, remember?”

House rules…if somebody deliberately takes something that isn’t theirs, and this applies equally to things like knives and favorite mortars and pestles, then they have to buy the other person a replacement. Stiles drinks a lot more water, then carefully sets the glass down. Carefully. Because joking with Lydia is one thing, but watching his father straightfaced, straight-up concede that he’s been doing…yeah, that’s another.

“So, Dad,” he says. “So, just how did you decide to come back again?”

His father calmly eats his steak. “I guess basically the same way you decided that you weren’t going to care about just the ones who stay dead.”

“Haha,” Stiles says dryly. And eats some chicken, and then he puts his silverware down. “Okay, really, what does that mean and what happened and Dad, if you’re gonna be back, you’re gonna get grilled and you know I do it out of love but still. Come on.”

His dad looks at him, and then away, so that Stiles gets a side view of the way the man’s mouth curls up. “Yeah,” his dad says, smiling wryly. “Yeah, I know, I’m back. I know what that means, Stiles.”

* * *

So Peter reminds them that dead people have nothing to do but talk, and they talk to each other as much as they try to talk to the living, and obviously they’re going to talk about living people who not only hear them, but are also willing to wrap up things of the vengeful nature for the dead. Which obviously isn’t all of it, and to know that Stiles doesn’t need Derek regretfully muttering in the middle of the night that Peter was always all about the magic, the more forbidden the better, and reportedly knows a shitload about necromancy and resurrections, maybe from personal experience.

“My nephew’s already up and walking, there’s not really much of that work to be done, is there,” is what Peter says when Stiles ties him down and fingers him senseless, and then slaps him awake again.

Smartass. Later that night Stiles walks by the bathroom and catches Peter asking Derek to check his face. He assumes Peter’s making a pass and keeps walking; Derek catches up a couple seconds later, and really, really wants to suck Stiles off, which tends to confirm the guess.

Lydia takes Peter on a book-hunting trip and lets him geek out over rare tomes and he drops, on purpose, like the baiting jerk he is, that werewolves have known for a while that revenge-tripping _changes_ you, gasp. So that’s why it’s all couched in rituals and symbols for them, so people who aren’t fully committed won’t get in over their heads. Which is interesting from a supernaturally anthropological standpoint, but Stiles’ self-diagnosed ADD issues are not that easy.

They let Peter help out with some of the planning. Stiles’ dad is a little leery about it, but even he has to admit that Peter gets results. Derek’s useful as an extra hand on-site, but Peter’s maintained a network of contacts that lets them do a little less breaking and entering and a little more walking in the front door. Peter pretends like he’s just totally fascinated to be let into the inner nemesis circle, but Stiles is fucking him and Stiles can tell Peter is genuinely relieved.

“I feel like you do have something riding you,” Stiles says to him one day, in downtime between jobs. “I mean, you did check out and all, and you’re getting along with Derek and Lydia, with a shocking lack of bloodshed, but there’s no way you’re just a death junkie.”

“Is that really so surprising?” Peter murmurs back. He’s lying on the bed next to Stiles, all naked to Stiles’ pajama bottoms only, turned mostly on his belly so Stiles can reach out and pet the fading claw-marks on his back. “They used to tell stories around the hearthfire about wolves following carriages, wagons, armies, anywhere there was the scent of the weak. Why hunt when you can just walk, and wait for the meat to fall by itself?”

Stiles snorts and traces one pink line over Peter’s shoulderblade, across the ribs and then rippling alongside the spine till it curves back out to touch the top of the hipbone. So Derek and Peter will share a bed, and also, occasionally, but especially if Stiles looks interested, share each other, but that doesn’t mean they’re over whatever the hell split them. They’re both betas and Peter’s healthy, far as Stiles can tell, but sometimes a mark will last longer on him, and without electricity or wolfsbane or anything like that. Like this one—it’s healed by the time Stiles gets to the end of it, but it lasted long enough for Stiles to trace the whole thing in the first place.

“I’m not seeing the meat here,” Stiles says. “Unless I’m giving you way, way too much credit, and you’re thinking I look like a tasty morsel.”

“Only in the most metaphorical sense,” Peter says, craning his head around and giving Stiles an inviting smile.

Derek walks out of the bathroom at that point, with more lube, and that cuts off any meaningful discussion. But later, for some reason, when he’s so worn out Stiles expects the man to just doze off while Stiles is wiping the lube and come from his ass, Peter nuzzles into the curve of Stiles’ neck and then—sighs. Low, pleased, but not excited, not just the dregs of arousal. It’s deeper, more relieved, like he’s scenting home ground after a very, very long time away.

“It’s the trail, you know,” he says. “Once you catch wind of it, you have to follow it down.”

“Trail?” Stiles says. “What, the dead people? You’re into ghosts?”

“No, not them,” Derek says abruptly. “ _They’re_ the trail.” 

When Stiles looks up, Derek hesitates, then drops into a crouch next to them. He and Peter eye each other for a second and then Peter, his smirk a little more dreamy-eyed than usual, maybe even tinged with actual affection, slips off Stiles’ shoulder and twists over and Derek puts his hands up at the same time and catches Peter’s head between them, drawing Peter into the kiss.

They look good together, Stiles isn’t going to lie. And sometimes, when they’re like that, not bickering or being difficult with him, just—just there, just playing around, and any second they’re going to turn back. Sometimes, when he watches them like that and feels like he could just put his hands down, palms out, and click his tongue and they’d come to the call, come crawling on their bellies, their faces turned up towards him, to nose right into his fingers, to _beg_ for that privilege. Sometimes he feels like—

—like there’s something they don’t have to tell him, because he already sees it. He sees and feels and hears it, all around him, like the drift of smoke off a nearby fire, the way the heat of the flames paints lines across his skin and the smell of it pricks his nose. He’s been seeing it since longer than they have.

It’s like he’s old, way older than either of them, and tapping into things they can only get the dimmest glimpse of, but even that glimpse, that little bit is enough to turn their heads. Drive them wild, lure the wolf right out of its den and over hills and through valleys till they come sloping through the grass after him, in his train, as they should be.

He loses his train of thought when he’s like that, and just ends up tangled into them, his teeth and his nails biting their skin as they lap and suck at his. Just loses it, forgets what he’s doing, and when he finally gets up from the bed, shaking his head and cursing his singing phone alarm, he puts his hands all over these red marks on them that don’t go away as fast as they should, and that he can’t remember them giving to each other. And neither of them seem to care either; they just rub at them, maybe dab a little water and soap at the dried blood, and then get up and slink after him. Werewolves.

“I was trying,” Lydia says to him. “You know I don’t talk to other banshees, I just hear what they have to say, but I tried the other day and…I’m not sure they can hear me.”

“What?” Stiles says, still rushing to not be late. He’s been a little late the last three times and his dad was upset enough to actually yell at him, tell him one more and he was going to get shelved for the next one.

“I think I said that wrong,” Lydia says after a second. She’s already got her things together, just waiting on him, and she doesn’t sound urgent at all. Just strangely confused. “They hear me. But I’m not sure—you know, I’m not sure they’re hearing what _I_ think they’re hearing.”

“We should look into that when we get back,” Stiles promises.

Except they don’t, because by the time they get back, it’s all clear and Stiles’ dad is on his way out.

* * *

Stiles’ dad informs him that there will be…company, in nice, euphemistic terms. 

So they’ve only just kind of made things good with each other, and anyway, if Stiles wanted to raise any objections, there are two big, werewolf-shaped pieces of evidence of his hypocrisy in the suite upstairs. And Stiles knows his dad and knows that it might circumstantially seem like the man managed to jog himself out of his existential issues via kinky sex, and oh, by the way, was careless enough to introduce Stiles’ left-behind sex toys to some random who might not have any idea what they do and who might have some massive, massive skeletons in their own closet. Or maybe just think they’re horrific monsters who need to be stopped. It might seem like that, but his dad wouldn’t mess them up that way.

Anyway, Stiles is going to give his dad the benefit of the doubt. “Lydia’s gonna want more details,” he says.

“I told her we’d talk when she’s back, but that won’t be for a while and I think Chris might show up before that,” his dad says. Waits a beat, and then snorts at Stiles. “You’re not the only one who texts in his pocket, kid. Look, if you’re worried, I already talked to the concierge and they can switch me to a different floor, no problem.”

“Oh, no, you don’t,” Stiles says. “If you’re going to discover a reckless endangerment streak, I am totally not letting you go down that road alone. It’s my duty as your son to at least bear witness to this kind of thing.”

His father gets this odd look on his face, almost nostalgic, except that Stiles thinks and thinks and can’t pick out any time when he was the one sitting around watching his dad be a fuck-up. Then he adds a grin to it, and the nostalgia goes weirdly amused, like this private joke he’s having and Stiles isn’t and maybe it’s an inappropriate, lewd joke, and look, Stiles isn’t one of those people who likes to pretend his parents made him via stork. His dad might not have had much of a sex life over the years, but Stiles doesn’t begrudge him one. Really.

It’s just—it’s hard to say, maybe it’s just the freshness of having his dad back and that little bit of offset you always get between memory and reality. Or maybe it’s just that plus his dad’s looking genuinely anticipatory for the first time Stiles can remember in a really, really long time.

Or maybe it’s ‘Chris’ turning out to be Chris fucking Argent, walking into the hotel room in a sleek suit with fuck-me eyes for Stiles’ dad and a trail of whispers like the wind through a battlefield full of corpses. Stiles grins and banters with his dad, and then goes into his room and texts Lydia like crazy in between researching on his laptop and quizzing the dead.

Lydia doesn’t answer him. She’s fine, Stiles knows that, she’s just not replying. She’s also not back at the hotel.

Peter and Derek come back and let him know that the info broker turned out to be a bust, so Derek busted them up a little and Peter’s going to need some blackmail material to avoid a police investigation. Distracted, Stiles tosses a few nuggets Peter’s way and then asks Derek where Erica got off to.

Derek says she’s probably still in the hotel bar pretending to get drunk and talking to Boyd.

Stiles snaps at Derek for letting that happen and Derek goes to get Erica, who’s miffed because she was just enjoying the cocktail menu and nobody was paying her any attention till fucking Derek walked in and dragged her out and she and Boyd had a fucking deal about if they got out, they were going to highroll it and she’s just trying to do right by him. “And that’s not all about goddamn revenge, you one-track-minded asshole, is that seriously all you pay attention to when dead people talk to you?” she snarls, before storming off to her room.

“Police are backing off,” Peter says absently, looking after her. He walks over and shuts the door, and then comes back to look at Stiles.

Same thing Derek is doing, except that he’s dropped onto the bed next to Stiles. But they’re both doing the concerned doe-eyes thing and Stiles’ dad is probably screwing the shit out of _Chris Argent_ next door because no wonder nothing Stiles or Lydia came up with was helping him if that was the problem and God. Stiles is just.

He’s probably overreacting. Having a delayed reaction. He’s reacting, anyway.

He gives up and shoves all his stuff aside and fucks Derek and Peter. They don’t ask what’s the matter. It kind of helps.

Afterward, Stiles checks his phone. Lydia’s sent him one text: _Just let me talk to him myself._

Stiles sits on the edge of the bed and holds his phone in both hands and looks at those words. Then he looks up, bouncing the phone up and down in one hand. He thinks about throwing it at the wall, but instead just shoves it on the dresser and goes to take a shower. Then he comes back out, sweat pants on, still rubbing at his hair with a towel, and he looks at the scratched, scraped, still-exhausted men in his bed.

“My dad’s in a thing with Chris Argent,” he says. “You got any problems with that?”

Derek stops in the middle of scratching some come off his inner thigh. He’s staring upside-down at Stiles, sprawled out on his back with the bits of sheets that do cover him coming nowhere near his indecent parts. “Oh. Him,” he says. “He’s alive?”

Peter’s pushed himself up against the headboard, and was fingering a bite mark on his shoulder. He stops playing with himself to just clasp that shoulder, pressing his lips together as he looks at Stiles. “He split off from the rest of his family when he was very young, and they never managed to lure him back,” he says. “The last I’d heard, he was allied with a pack up—”

“I don’t need his goddamn resume,” Stiles says irritably. “Just, does that bother you or what?”

“Does it bother you?” Derek says.

Stiles jerks the towel off his head, clenches it a little, and then turns on his heel and stalks over to the door connecting the suites. He bangs on it twice, then opens it and walks through. “Hey, Dad, so—”

He stops. His dad’s not…well, not in the bedroom. The bathroom light is on and the tap is running in there. But who is in the bedroom, is Chris Argent. Kneeling on the carpet at the end of the bed, suit all mussed but still on him, wiping at his mouth with both hands because his wrists are tied together with a belt. Not his belt: that’s still around his waist.

Argent looks over at him, like it’s no big deal what’s going on, and then casually undos the belt around his wrists with his teeth and a quick jerk of the head and a couple corkscrew motions of his arms. “He’s in the—”

“Stiles, what?” Stiles’ father calls.

“Did you kill somebody?” Stiles says.

“Yeah,” Argent says, just as Stiles’ dad walks out. “Not that that’s why I’m here.”

Stiles’ father looks annoyed. And a little tense on top of that, though that doesn’t stop him from coming over and picking up the towel where Stiles dropped it. “His daughter got married,” he says, folding up the towel.

When Stiles looks at Argent, the man seems mildly embarrassed, but that’s all. Just a little resigned about how silly it sounds, and never mind the whole context. “Okay. Right. So—”

“Did you get Blackwood’s location?” Stiles’ father says.

Stiles opens his mouth, shuts it. Opens it and grabs back the towel from his father; it slips out of its folds a little and he winces and then winces at his wince. Then he stuffs it under his arm and looks at his dad. “Are you seriously—”

“I’m back to going at this, Stiles,” his father says, equal parts irritated and tired and guilty. “And if it’s better for you, I’ll do it on my own. You’ve been doing it without me anyway. I came back to see you first because we haven’t for a while, and I wanted to tell you in person, but if it’s not going to help and it’ll just make you—”

“What? No, it’s fine,” Stiles says. Then grimaces and looks away before he can see how disbelieving his dad is. “I mean—I mean it’s been a while and I’m still just—it was weird how you left, okay? It was weird and we never completely talked about it till you came _back_ , and now you’re—you’re—with him on top of that and I just need an actual second, Dad. Okay?”

“Okay, Stiles,” his father says. Soft and slow, understanding in a way that simultaneously soothes Stiles and makes him feel like a weapons-grade brat. “Okay. No rush, anyway. Though Blackwood, since I’m around—”

“Deucalion Blackwood?” Argent says. He’s gotten up to sit on the edge of the bed; his cuffs have ridden up to show pink marks around his wrists and he’s got a damp patch across his crotch seam and one of Stiles’ father’s guns is peeking from an underarm holster he _totally_ wasn’t wearing when he walked in. And he’s acting like all of that is par for the course. “My son-in-law had a run-in with him, and we put a geas on him banning him from the territory. Could probably tinker with that and—”

“GPS him, yeah,” Stiles says, considering it. Then he looks at Argent. “So, you’re gonna kill people?”

“I was kind of doing that before,” Argent says dryly, and Stiles’ dad grins a little, looking at him and Stiles is _okay_ with his dad being happy. He is _not_ judgmental about his dad’s life choices. He is an _open-minded_ person.

“Yeah, well, it’s just, I thought your family had a code,” Stiles prods.

Argent doesn’t blink, doesn’t twitch. That casualness of his is already starting to eat at Stiles, and also it looks—it’s familiar. It’s like Derek from certain angles, the way they don’t give a shit about how they’re supposed to react.

“Yeah, so?” Argent says. He reaches up and scratches at the side of his neck, still looking at Stiles, even though it’s Stiles’ dad who is fidgeting. “My daughter’s the leader. It’s her generation.”

“Okay,” Stiles says after a long moment, and a quick look at his father. “Okay. Well, then, yeah, let’s get Deucalion out of the way already. God knows Erica’s getting a little antsy, and we’ve still got two more after him.”

“You want me to talk to her?” Stiles’ dad says, frowning. “She holding up?”

Stiles shrugs. He’s being a little off-handed and his dad…can call him out on it, but later. Right now Stiles would like a second outside of this room.

His dad lets him go. He walks back into his room and shuts the door, and stands there for a few seconds. Then he goes back to the bedroom.

Derek and Peter are still lying on the bed. His phone is still on the dresser. He picks it up and texts Lydia back that fine, he’ll shut up till she says. Then he puts it down and crawls into the center of the bed, turning over onto his back. The other two men ease down around him and he sighs.

“I feel like this is an extended exercise in how I don’t need my dad but I want him, and sure, fine, but I do want him around and I literally spend my time doing what dead people want, can I not get just a couple things here?” he says to the ceiling.

“So you’re bothered,” Derek says.

Stiles makes a face, and doesn’t immediately let it smooth out. He flaps his hand and it ends up falling on…Peter’s hair, he thinks. He tangles his fingers in it and listens to Peter’s breathing change. “I’m not bothered. Not really. It’s not that I’m bothered,” he says. “It’s…I’m finally getting how what happened pissed my dad off so badly he went off like a hermit, I think. That’s what I am.”


	5. Chapter 5

Stiles’ father gets shot in the head.

It’s a pretty straightforward set-up. In the target’s home, cornering him in the basement, then just sitting there and babysitting while the dead take their turns. And it’s not like the target was super-smart or anything either—in fact, it’s sheer carelessness, leaving a loaded firearm stuffed into a closet at that angle, ready to fall out if you’re just a little too rough with the door. It’s just a fucking accident.

Actually, the rest of them aren’t even clear on what happens because Stiles’ dad gets right back up. Sure, he’s got blood on his face, and there’s a bullethole in the ceiling, but all the dots don’t connect. And then the ghosts are diving in at the target and they have to deal with that, and—

“Are you sure?” Stiles asks, when his dad finally says something.

His father is standing over the blood-smeared chalk circle, stiff-faced, staring down at what’s left of the body with a look that Stiles has never seen on his face and they’ve been through everything. “I saw my goddamn brains,” he says, slow but sharp. “And they smelled it. Tell him you didn’t.”

Derek freezes, while Peter darts a look at Stiles, sucking his breath. So Stiles starts to turn on him, and Lydia drops her sponge to stalk towards Peter, but before either of them get at him, Stiles’ father reaches into his coat and pulls out a knife. Then sticks it into the center of his palm.

He’s bleeding and it’s red, but he pulls the knife out, grunting, and the wound closes back up. They all stare for a second, and then Stiles’ father turns on his heel. He happens to be facing Derek and Derek just stands there while Stiles’ dad socks on him on the jaw.

“Dad!” Stiles says.

“He’s bruising,” his dad says, looking at Derek’s jaw. 

Derek rocked in place but didn’t fall over, and when Stiles’ father stares him into dropping his hand, they can all see the mark on his jaw. It fades, not quite as slow as if an alpha had gotten him, but way slower than it should be from a human. Stiles’ dad breathes in once, sharp, and then lets it out like it’s full of lead. 

“This—this,” he says, gesturing at the circle. And he’s always insisted on them not glorifying what they do, but he’s also never sounded horrified at it, not till right then. “It did something. I knew something was different, but I didn’t…but we’re different.”

“So we leveled up or something?” Stiles says. He’s still staring at the drops of his father’s blood on the ground. “But—isn’t that—”

“Don’t try it,” Lydia and his father both say.

Stiles makes an outraged noise, because yeah, he’s experimental, but he’s not about to jump in front of a bus when he can check lower down the scale like his _dad_ , who just _stabbed himself_. And for a second it’s just ridiculous. They did a lot of favors for dead people so somehow that gives them superpowers?

“I did not think that would happen,” Peter says, very low, very absentminded. At least he sounds that way, but when Stiles looks over, he finds the man looking as focused as he’s ever seen Peter get. Focused and stunned and if anything, awed.

“What would,” Stiles’ dad says flatly.

“The Furies,” Peter says, blinking. “The Erinyes. The angry ones, who turn into the Eumenides, the kindly ones. But—it’s a change in purpose, not one in power, really…”

Stiles father turns and studies Peter for a few seconds. Peter’s rightfully wary of the man, but normally because getting on Stiles’ father’s bad side basically is getting kicked out by Stiles. Not because it looks like Peter genuinely doesn’t want to engage with the man.

Then Stiles’ dad turns back to the floor. He looks at it. Raises his hand and runs it over the top of his head and lets it drop back to his side. “That’s it,” he mutters, and he walks out.

He doesn’t _walk out_ walk out. He’s too responsible for that. They have the job to wrap up and then he makes sure that Stiles and Lydia are set up with everything they need to go forward on their own. Which isn’t that much, both of them have been running solos pretty regularly, but Stiles’ dad covers off on everything anyway. And then he tells them he’ll be fine but he needs to just stop and think.

Stiles talks about the stuff he noticed, the way his marks last on Derek and Peter, the occasions when he seemed stronger than he should be, the weird mental spells he sometimes has. Lydia does a lot of research and explains to them that nemeses normally don’t last this long, or operate in groups, despite how vengeance deities (Greek and others) typically occur in multiples. Something about how working with the dead tends to shorten your lifespan, either because you can’t satisfy them and so they turn on you, or because you just go bonkers. But if you do last, well, apparently you _can_ still earn yourself a little place in the myths. And they both tell his dad that sure, it’s a little unexpected, but hey, immortality. Not bad, right?

“Better than being dead,” his father says, but he’s looking past Stiles. He’s sorry, he really is, but he’s not giving either. “I just need some time off. Look, you’ll be fine. I know you two, and it’s been a long time since I really had to tell either of you what to do. It’ll be all right.”

Sure, it would be. Sure, it was. But thing is, Stiles’ dad was still gone. And for all that they got with the nemesis gig, when his dad left—it still felt like more got taken.

* * *

Chris Argent is efficient, Stiles will give him that. He changes into clothes that don’t look like he and Stiles’ father fucked standing up, and then he and Stiles pin down Deucalion’s location, which thankfully is within commuting distance, in a couple hours. He blinks once, hard, upon seeing Derek and Peter, and then he shrugs and sits down and plans out how to snatch Deucalion.

Lydia’s finally on her way back, so they’re going to wait for her to show up before they move out. Peter and Derek keep hovering and it’s aggravating and Stiles can’t actually solve that with sex _every_ time, so he kicks them out to go work the werewolf rumor mill, see if they can’t find a pair of six-foot-plus twins who merge into a mountain-sized werewolf—for some reason with the supernatural, the weirder it is, the harder it is to track down—and then he goes to the hotel bar. Not because he wants a drink, but because it’s the only place in the hotel where he can sit as long as he wants and nobody will bother him about it.

Nobody on the hotel staff, anyway. “See, this is exactly what I was doing down here,” Erica says, sliding into the booth next to Stiles. She at least placed her order at the bar on her way over, so the drink just gets dropped off and they don’t have to act polite for the waiter, but it’s still just one too many people in the booth. “So. Your dad’s got a boyfriend.”

Stiles drums his fingers against the table. “Doesn’t Boyd want to go out to a club or something? Or see a movie, or watch you have sex with somebody who’s actually into you?”

At least one of those hits, but Erica just takes the blow and smiles to show Stiles all the blood in her humor. “You know what I find funny? You’re nicer to me when you think I’m gonna take off, but you act like I have the wrong idea when I’m okay to stay. Double standards much?”

“It’s not a double standard, it’s just I don’t really want to get to know you, and I don’t think you actually want to get to know me,” Stiles mutters. “Trust me, I’ve seen Lydia date plenty, it always looks a lot different when all the people you want to be dead are dead.”

“Yeah, well, I was okay with the PTSD quickie too,” Erica drawls. “I guess we just do seem to wait around a lot, so we gotta make small talk.”

“We actually don’t,” Stiles says.

She shrugs him off, sipping at her drink. “Whatever. Your dad’s boy is pretty fucking hot, and he’s got the whole jaded looking for a reason thing that seems like a hereditary kink of yours. And I guess what the hell, it’s not like hunters or werewolves really matter when it comes down to revenge, right?”

Stiles lifts both hands and presses them flat against the table. Then he takes them down and leans back in the booth and looks at her. “Are you trying to make me feel better?”

Erica takes another sip, tilts her head, and then frowns. “I think I am, actually.”

“Why?” Stiles says.

“I don’t know.” She jiggles her drink and the ice chips click and then she puts it down. Grabs the edge of the seat cushion and kicks her feet back into the booth, looking more like a teenager than a survivor. “You’re a bunch of asshole mercenaries, and sure, I want what you can do for me but I’m not so—I’m not so fucked-up that I can’t see what I’m gonna get when it’s all over. I still won’t have a pack and Boyd will still be dead, and don’t tell me you’re gonna help me figure out all _that_. That’s not what you people do.”

“Nope,” Stiles says after a second. “No, it is not.”

She nods along with him, swaying forward, and then she snorts and grabs up her drink again. “Maybe it makes me feel like I’m getting a little bit of that done. The afterward part. I mean, if I can talk to you about your problems, and you’re this immortal vengeance guy who’s just getting a suicide squad tossed into your fucking lap, didn’t even look for it, let alone ask, and you’re _still_ having issues…well, then we really are all still human, aren’t we?”

Stiles breathes in, and—then does not rip her a new one. Because she’s aggravating, but she’s also somebody who he’s helping out. And also has some points in there. And _also_ , is riling him on purpose, and honestly, he respects that, considering where she’s come from.

“Just so you know, Boyd,” Stiles says. He turns his head a little away from Erica, towards the cold spot that’s been drifting in front of them, even though he doesn’t need to, it’s not like ghosts have physical limitations on their hearing range. “I’m not hitting on her, but…I think maybe, if things had gone down different, we would’ve had a fun date. A couple. I’m definitely thinking I would’ve gotten a callback.”

Erica laughs, shaking her head. “Like Lydia wouldn’t be there first, in that world. But hey, I appreciate that you’re trying to stay human, even if you are an asshole. That’s…probably not what it looks like, from here.”

She is trying to make him feel better. And he was sort of trying to return the favor, except that…Stiles decides he’d better just get up and leave. Client relations, he’s learned a thing or two about cutting it off before it gets out of control, on either side of things.

He leaves Erica nursing her drink and goes back upstairs. Runs into Derek, who says that Lydia came in and then she and Stiles’ dad went to the rooftop restaurant to talk things out. Derek obviously wants Stiles to come with him, probably to go make a pillow fort and burrow into it and pretend that that keeps things out, but Stiles isn’t ready for that either. So Stiles flips through his pockets and digs out the keycard to his father’s suite, and goes in.

“Your dad’s out,” Argent says. From the bed. That he’s tied to.

“Yep, so I heard,” Stiles says.

Argent is attractive. Not really Stiles’ type, too blond and lean, but he can see the merits. He can also see, he thinks with a mixture of horror and black amusement, that his dad must’ve been paying way, way more attention than he’d figured to all the stupid sophomoric attention-getting stuff he’d been pulling with Derek, because the whole arrangement is pretty familiar.

Belly-down, wrists tied behind the back, plug handle sticking out from between buttocks aimed at the ceiling because there are pillows stuffed under Argent, and ropes snaking out to either side of him, keeping his knees spread. His head’s down on the bed, but the pillows mean he doesn’t have to turn it sideways to keep from suffocating. He would have to if he wanted to see Stiles, but he doesn’t do that. Just keeps leaning his forehead against the mattress, breathing nice and even like Stiles isn’t hopping up next to his naked, bound body and drumming fingers right by his face.

“So, you’re gonna run around and do the nemesis thing with my dad,” Stiles says, when Argent doesn’t.

“Seems to be the plan,” Argent says.

Stiles leans over him for another second, but the man still isn’t twitching. He pushes back into a cross-legged sit and switches to drumming against his knees, which make a louder, much more satisfying sound. “We’re still checking you out, but you seem to know how to clean up after yourself.”

“Okay,” Argent says.

“Okay. Okay, you are just—hey, are you getting off on this?” Stiles says, squeezing his knees and pulling them up and then letting them drop back. “I mean, so we haven’t had a normal life in _forever_ , but my dad always tried really, really hard to not let things just drift off into, I don’t know, crazy cult land, and even when he found out we were immortal via a bullet to the head, he was all, this is fucking weird, I need to regroup and that’s a pretty reasonable reaction, honestly, and now he’s—”

“I think you should be having this talk with your father,” Argent says, in almost the exact same tone. Almost, because just at the end there’s a little irritated edge.

Stiles bends over as far as he can and peers at Argent’s face. Argent is looking at the bed, not him, but the man’s eye twitches a little, so Stiles knows Argent has peripheral vision on him. “Talk about how he gets off on domming famously coldblooded hunters? I thought you had a kid too. I mean, would you want to explain his sex toys to her?”

That finally gets him a twitch, a little start to a grimace, but then Argent twists his head around and looks full-on at Stiles and he’s already just done with it. “Look, your dad’s got his own opinions,” he says, politely slow. “But I’m pretty sure he didn’t set this up for me and you.”

Which…Stiles has to give him, because his dad is. His dad is. Stiles starts to push himself up and then stops when he’s still on his elbows. He rubs at the side of his face and tells himself that in all honesty, this is not the weirdest situation that’s ever come up. After all, his dad walked out after being _shot in the head_.

“Not sure where you’re getting the coldblooded either,” Argent adds. “Always thought the family rep was being too quick with the trigger.”

“Well, yeah, I heard about that, but you have that whole code thing too. And the female leader thing,” Stiles says. “Speaking of. So your daughter’s in charge.”

Argent’s shoulders pull up just a little. “Yeah.”

“So…I hear that usually, when you switch leaders, the old generation takes themselves out of the running,” Stiles says. “I mean. With prejudice.”

“Traditionally,” Argent says, slowplaying the correction. His shoulders go back down. “Historically. That one was more about working around inheritance laws, making sure it went to the right heir. It hasn’t really been enforced in a century.”

Stiles starts drumming his fingers again. “No kidding. Coincidentally, that’s right about where outside observers started saying your family went off the rails.”

“Guess it’s hard to see all the consequences of what you’re doing, on that kind of time scale.” Argent’s dry but he’s also thoughtful, that trace of sarcasm turned completely inward. He still has his gaze on Stiles and it’d be unnaturally steady if it didn’t have that sympathetic vibe, like he actually does understand the real drive here—and that sympathy is throwing Stiles too much for anything else to get in. “If you’re asking whether that’s why I’m here, it’s not. I promised my daughter.”

“She had the same idea as me, then?” Stiles says after a second. “Thought you might bring back the good old days?”

The smile Argent brings up in response to that reminds Stiles of a utility knife: plain, uncool, but can take off a finger just as quick. “Something like that. And she was…she wasn’t just seeing things, but that wasn’t ever in the picture. It wasn’t a hard promise to make.”

“Yeah, sure, and my dad didn’t play finders keepers with some of my spare sex toys,” Stiles says.

“Huh. So that’s why he had them around?” Argent says, like it’s only just now occurred to him to be curious about that. Which is not really reassuring Stiles about him, but then he shifts himself against the pillows he’s straddling, fights back a couple hisses, and fixes his eyes on Stiles. “It was about getting out, all right? She didn’t need me, and—and _I_ didn’t need to stay. I gave a good life to my family and my family’s code and traditions and baggage, gave all that plenty of years. And I didn’t feel like giving it more, and your dad…your dad’s got a few other roads to go down, ones I haven’t tried.”

“And he looks like a good ride,” Stiles says.

Argent smiles at him again. It’s unsettling. Not just the calm, but the fact that under that something’s moving in the dark, crouching just beyond the light, and Argent isn’t trying, plainly isn’t that kind of fucked-up, but it speaks to Stiles. And the way it speaks to him, he suddenly thinks he can see what his dad sees in the man, and it’s just…he never really thought about his dad seeing that sort of thing. Even though they _live_ in that kind of world, and it should be obvious but…it’s just, it’s his dad.

“Can’t say I’m unhappy about the trip so far,” Argent says. “And I’ve seen enough of the road, I know what I’m getting into. Not blind about that.”

Stiles snorts because he’s got nothing he wants to say to that, and because he’s a little preoccupied with more important thoughts than whatever’s eating up his dad’s boyfriend. Who can’t exactly get his dad killed anyway, and anyway, it’s not on Argent that Stiles didn’t totally know his dad like he thought he did.

“Hey,” he says, halfway off the bed. He’s twisted around to get his foot on the floor, so he can’t see Argent’s face anymore. “So when you ran into him. Did he seem…was he okay?”

“He wasn’t really talking about that,” Argent says after a second. He’s quiet like that’s it, but then he takes a sharp, if short, breath. “He missed you, he said that, but—look, I’m a father too, you miss your kid but you trust them, after a while. You figure out you don’t have to watch them all the time and then it…it can take a while, figuring out what you’re going to watch instead. By the time you raise a kid, you kind of forget what it’s like to not have them.”

“Okay,” Stiles says. He gets off the bed, as in the background ropes creak and Argent sucks air a little bit. Then he pulls out his phone, mostly from habit, but it turns out he’s got a few texts: Lydia says she and his dad are done, Peter’s coming back too, his dad says he thinks they’re good to move after Deucalion tonight.

He takes a couple steps away from the bed while he’s reading them, then catches himself and almost turns back. Then thinks the better of it. Sure, he could threaten Argent, do the standard shovel talk routine, but honestly, they’re nemeses and Argent hooked up with his father while trying to find an alternative to hereditary extrajudicial killing. What’s the point?

So no. This one, he’ll just leave to his dad.

* * *

When Stiles’ father leaves, he says he’s just going to get out in the backwoods where it’s easier to tune out the dead, so he can be sure all the thoughts are his. Which is a lie, it’s been a really, really long time since any of them had to worry about being brainwashed by the dead, but Stiles lets it go. Lydia lets it go. Peter sort of alludes to it once but never does that again after Stiles kicks him out of the car and makes him find his own way back to their current base.

Anyway, Stiles’ dad doesn’t put a timeline on it but he doesn’t say, he’s going to be out there for a long time. But then Stiles and Lydia sack out after a job and Stiles’ dad calls to let them know he’s bought a farm.

The property is related to a job of theirs. It wasn’t payment that the ghosts offered up; it also wasn’t something the dead wanted to go to anybody else, so they could’ve taken it on the spot. But they didn’t need the money (honestly, they make enough on interest these days that payment is just a way to keep things out of other people’s hands), so it escheated and they all forgot about it. Till Stiles’ dad apparently wandered by and remembered and put up the winning bid at auction, and now he’s going to settle in and repair cars, apparently.

“Does he like cars?” Lydia says to Stiles. “I thought he got irritated whenever Derek rented a—”

“That’s because Derek rents flashy ones that’ll light up the police radar,” Stiles says. “I think he means vintage. Like classic ones.”

Lydia presses her lips together. They’re sitting together on the couch and he can see how white-knuckled her hand is around her phone. “Well, does he like _vintage_? Or _classic_?”

“I don’t know,” Stiles says after a second. “He’s never talked about it. We should check that out.”

They visit. Multiple times. The whole car thing, as far as Stiles can tell, starts because the barn on the farm had a half-restored Cadillac in it when his father bought the property, and his father figured why not. It seems like a pretty harmless hobby, and it at least tells them that his dad’s not settling down to die of boredom or anything like that. He’s just…retiring, kind of.

It’s not like they can make him come back. They don’t even want to make him. If he’s not happy, then they don’t want to keep him unhappy, but they just—can’t make much sense of it. He keeps saying what they’re doing is fine with him. If they have a question, want to run an idea by him, he’s still ready and willing for that but he just…doesn’t want to leave this stupid farm with these stupid cars. And they don’t want to ask him to do that.

Though they do ask a lot of questions about why. Man, they ask about everything, from how it started to what they are now and on through what his dad wants with the farm. They just don’t ask _him._

* * *

Deucalion’s easy, for all his vaunted smarts and manipulative talents. With all of them there, and with the dead always ready to put in a word or two, catching and pulling him down is like catching and smashing an overripe fruit. And then he ends up breaking the fastest, but then, the talkers always do. They make the mistake of thinking that, if the dead can talk back, well, then the dead can be persuaded. But that’s the thing—the dead act like they do when they were alive but they aren’t alive anymore. So they don’t change their minds.

Halfway through Deucalion gives up that the twins are nearby too, having stuck with him for protection, like idiots. Peter and Derek and Argent go off to retrieve them, while Stiles’ dad takes a turn keeping Erica company. And Stiles and Lydia go sit on the back stoop.

“You okay?” Stiles says.

“You mean am I going to kill him even though you two are as close as the postmodern age is going to get to demigods, and the answer is no,” Lydia says. She’s not checking her nails or her hair or her make-up, or doing anything except sitting next to him with her empty hands folded in her lap. “We had a good talk.”

“Yeah?” Stiles says.

Lydia shoots him a look. “Yes.”

“Okay, well, great, because we had a good talk too but I’m still—I’m still—I mean, he’s back and he’s got his groove back and that is _awesome_ , but—” Stiles lifts and lowers his hands till Lydia sighs and grabs one wrist and pins it to the stoop “—what’s his groove, exactly?”

“Fucking Chris Argent till he turns into the same kind of clean-up crew you have?” Lydia says.

Stiles lets out a half-hearted laugh. “Hey, I keep telling you, whenever you want an entourage too, we’ll get you one. It’s not like it’s two nemeses and a banshee, Lyds, we’ve always said it’s the three of us.”

“I know,” Lydia says, and suddenly she’s dropping her eyes, her voice going low too. She smooths her hand halfway down her thigh, like taking the wrinkles out of her skirt also takes them out of her life, then looks over at Stiles. “You know, I don’t think he really wants to be back.”

Stiles sucks in his breath.

“But I don’t want to go back either,” Lydia says, a little louder, still watching him. “And do you really, Stiles? Do you really want to go back to how it was? Checking in with him all the time, waiting for him to make a call? Isn’t that what the whole business with Derek and Peter was about?”

“You talk like we were doing it wrong before,” Stiles says.

Lydia still has her hand on his wrist and she squeezes that, leaning towards him. “And _you_ should know better than to say something like that. It’s—”

“Yeah, no, I get it, okay, rite of passage and growing up and leaving the nest, like we weren’t already abusing the archetypes,” Stiles mutters. He looks away, then at her again. And she’s looking back, she’s always been looking back where he’s concerned and she is firm and determined and also, waiting. Because she always does that too. “Well, were we—was anybody actually going to ask for that?”

“Probably not,” she says, waiting for him to smile sourly in acknowledgement. “But on the other hand, was anybody going to say we weren’t doing that?”

Stiles draws in a breath. And then lets it out. And then he sits with her, and thinks about that, and his dad, and all the things that they’ve done, and learned to do. All the things that they’ve been _asked_ to do, and haven’t done, and at the end of the day, it comes back to his dad looking at the unwanted gift basket the supernatural tossed at them and figuring out how to just let them live with it. And then—and then they grew into it, for better or for worse, but what never changes is that his dad is his dad. And he’s his dad’s son.

“I was angry with him, when he went,” Lydia suddenly says. “I told him that, and he said he knew and he was sorry. And then—I don’t know why, but I was angry again for a second, and I think I was even angrier about that than I was when he first left.”

“It’s because it reminds you,” Stiles says. “When he does that. You remember how—I mean, he wasn’t your dad, but still, we were acting like we wouldn’t be able to know what to do without him to tell us. And that’s just—like throwing away everything he ever taught us.”

“Exactly,” Lydia says. She sits up a little, stretching out her back, and then looks at him again. “My _actual_ father wanted to stick me in an insane asylum because I was hearing voices. It’s not like he ever told me anything useful.”

Stiles snorts, then slings his arm over her shoulders. She wrinkles her nose but he can feel her bending, and it’s towards him. “So really, we’re just tearing ourselves up here, over absolutely nothing.”

“I guess you can’t teach everything,” Lydia says, with a wry smile pulling at the side of her mouth.

“Nah,” Stiles says. “But we get there. I think we’re getting there.”

* * *

Deucalion’s barely dead when the twins get slung into the room. They’re terrified, clinging to each other as best they can around the bespelled ropes and charms that are keeping them from merging. Derek steps over their legs, crossing the room, and that twin jerks them in and whines as if Derek had punched him in the kidney.

Stiles’ father is still squatting by Deucalion’s circle, wiping off the chalk with a rag, but he turns and rises, just as the air starts to prickle with gathering dead. And just as he’s gotten all the way to standing, Erica grabs his arm.

She’s staring at the twins. “Wait,” she says. “Wait. Just—”

“Please,” a twin says, looking at her with fear and horror tainting the recognition in his eyes. “Please, we’re sorry, we’re so sorry, we—”

“Fuck your sorry,” Erica snaps, jerking forward.

She’s sharp enough about it that Derek pivots to intercept, because the twins aren’t circled up yet and the ghosts can’t get to them, and ghosts are really, really unpleasant about being denied their chance. But Erica settles herself without even looking at him, and anyway, over her head, Stiles’ dad is staring Derek into stepping back.

“Fuck you,” Erica says. She’s breathing a little hard, and she looks exhausted, with huge dark circles under her eyes and an ashy tone to her skin. “Fuck you. Sorry doesn’t—it doesn’t fix it, and anyway, you’re just saying that because you know, don’t you? You know what’s coming to you here.”

Peter walks around the perimeter of the room till he can come up behind Stiles. He’s careful about it, doesn’t come up directly behind, but is offset enough so that Stiles can reach back and up and grab his nape without dislocating an elbow. And he’s looking for the warning squeeze he gets anyway, looking for it so he can dip and nuzzle behind Stiles’ ear, nudging Stiles into looking at where Chris Argent is leaning against the wall behind the twins, watching Erica and Stiles’ dad with a tellingly blank expression.

“Should we?” Peter murmurs, and across the room Derek pricks alert.

“Shut it,” Stiles mutters back, looking at his dad.

“But—but you know what,” Erica goes on. Her tone is abrupt, disjointed, like she’s picking out her words from multiple hats and then juggling them into a sentence. “Fuck it. I’m just—I’m not taking your apology, all right, but I’m sick of this. I’m sick of you people fucking with me, even now that I’m out. I’m done.”

“You are,” Lydia says, just as Erica starts to step forward. She raises her brow and Erica stiffens, hand slipping off Stiles’ dad’s arm. “But you’re not the only one.”

The twins, who’d gone quiet in hope, let out another round of sobs. Erica pulls her lips back into a snarl of a smile, and then laughs for good measure. “Yeah, yeah, and I can feel—Boyd’s pissed too, he’s not done, you don’t even need to tell me that. But I don’t give a shit.”

“He’s not, actually,” Stiles says. “Well, not at you. The rest of the dead around here, that’s a different story.”

Erica looks over and oddly, seems to falter at that. But then she pulls herself back up, and even gives her hair a toss to get it back over her shoulder. She smiles at Stiles and it’s still pretty sharp, but it’s close enough to friendly that Derek aims a growl her way. Which she ignores. “Okay, then, Boyd, you are awesome and God, I miss you,” she says, looking around at all the spaces where people aren’t standing. “And the rest of you, you are fucking _dead_. You’re gonna catch up sooner or later. And I just—I’m done with this. I’m not feeling better, and I’m not only not watching this, I’m not going with this anymore and you know what? I don’t think _they_ are gonna feel better about walking out of here.”

“Are they?” Lydia says.

“Lyds,” Stiles says.

Erica blinks hard, like she maybe forgot about the rest of them in her tirade, and then she looks sharply between Stiles and Lydia. But the two of them are looking at Stiles’ dad, who just stands there. Watching.

“No, they’re not,” Erica says. Slowly, deliberately misreading the question, with a big smile on her face. Then she bends over and looks at the twins. “Right? Because you’re gonna walk out, but it’s not like you’re gonna go for another pack, because you know now. You know you’re just adding to the wait list. And that list isn’t ever going to get shorter. And you know what, fuck it, I don’t care if I’m starting my _own_ list right now. What I care about, I care about making me feel okay, right now, while I’m still alive. So if you walk out of here, you know that too—it’s not you. I couldn’t give less of a shit about you. It’s me that matters.”

“You’re not starting your own list,” Stiles’ dad says. He grimaces as Erica jumps, then spins around to look at him, then bobs his head slightly in apology. “We’ll settle that.”

“Oh, yeah?” Erica says skeptically. “And what’s next, you telling me I’ll be all right?”

Stiles’ dad grins at her. “No, I won’t say that. But you’ll be better. That, I will say.”

Erica laughs again, taking a step back, but it dies as Stiles’ dad just keeps smiling at her. She takes another step, her arms going up around her, and then she darts a look at Stiles, then Lydia. Then she looks back at Stiles’ dad. He shrugs at her and she opens and shuts her mouth. She pauses for another second, then pivots on one heel.

A couple slashes of her claws, and the twins are free. She stands back and when they look at her, she snarls. They have red eyes and she doesn’t, but they flee the room without ever getting off their hands and knees, as far as Stiles can tell. And Erica stands and watches till they’re gone, her shoulders frozen tight.

Once they’re out of sight, she takes one deep breath that jerks her shoulders loose. Her arms unwrap from around her next, and then she looks around at them again. She’s got a little lost weave to her movements, before she tugs her spine straight with a last laugh.

“Fuck this,” she says, walking out.

Her footsteps stalk rapidly down the hall and then out the door. There’s a distant thud as the door closes, and then Stiles and Lydia look at each other.

“Well, I guess there goes the weekend,” Stiles says, pulling out a piece of chalk.

“I got it,” his dad says. When Stiles turns over, his dad’s already squatting again, halfway through a series of anti-spirits runes. And Chris Argent is pushing off the wall, striking a match on it to light a candle that he walks over to set by Stiles’ dad. “My call, my clean—”

“Oh, come on,” Stiles says, before he can help it. He pauses and then he grins at his father. “Don’t be greedy. We’re still with you, you know. Even if we aren’t sharing all the time now.”

His father goes a little still, looking at him and then at Lydia. There’s a lot in his dad’s eyes, almost too much for Stiles to look at it, but mostly, Stiles thinks, there’s pride, and gratefulness, and love.

And well, a little sarcasm. It’s his dad, after all. “All right, then,” his dad says, bending back down with the chalk. “One for the road.”

* * *

“I feel like we should at least not pull the same routine twice,” Stiles says. “So when you said you’re back—”

“I was going to stay for a little bit, if either of you wanted that,” his father says. “I kind of, well, fucked it up last time. I think I could’ve made a smoother exit.”

Stiles is at the point where he just smiles, because yeah, true, but also yeah, them. “Thanks, but Lyds and I talked, and I think we’re okay without that. It’s not the same now, and I think it’d be…it’d be more like what happened last time if we tried to force you back into how we do things, even just for a little bit. And look, Dad, if you’re gonna set up your own thing, you’re gonna have to focus on that and we don’t want to get in the way. I just—I wanted to ask, you know. What that was.”

It’s a couple minutes before his father answers. Not because he’s reluctant or anything like that. He’s just arranging things in his head first, getting them all lined up, like he likes to do. “I think, Stiles, if we’re doing this for a—a long time, anyway. We should use that time. Some of these jobs…they don’t wrap quick, not if you do them the way you should. Which is why we didn’t take them. If you and Lydia still want to stick with the short ones, I’m not objecting. It’s your choice. But I…I had the time to think it over, and I have the _time_. Chris and I. We have the time to take those, and I think they’ll suit us better.”

“The dead can be kind of shortsighted sometimes,” Stiles agrees. He pauses, then laughs as he gets out of his seat. “Funny, right. They have time, too.”

“But they lost their chances,” his father reminds him. “That’s why they’re always so angry, and blind with it.”

“True. Well, gotta say, I don’t see anything wrong with doing more for more,” Stiles says, turning around. “Just remember to come by once in a while?”

“Kid,” his father says, grinning at him. “You can’t get rid of me anyway, you know that.”

“Yeah,” Stiles says, smiling back. “Yeah, I know. But even so—even with all this time, it’s good to hear it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Erinyes, or Furies, originally were vengeance deities who relentlessly chased wrongdoers such as those who spilled their own family's blood. As part of the cycle of myths surrounding the [House of Atreus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Atreus), they metamorphosed into the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones, who are more about justice and atonement and mercy than straight-up vengeance.


	6. Epilogue 1: Stiles, Lydia, Derek and Peter

“I’m still a banshee,” Lydia says.

“Well, yes, but you don’t just sense when the dead become dead, you keep company with them. You work with them—manage them, even. Your power goes beyond the moment of death itself,” Peter says. “You’re not _just_ a banshee.”

She glances up from her phone. “I was never _just_ anything.”

Peter smiles and holds up his hands, placating, and Lydia tosses her hair over her shoulder and goes back to checking her messages. Then she looks up again, as Stiles pulls the car over to the curb.

“And the whole follow the trail deal,” Stiles says, looking into the backseat. “You could’ve just said you were looking to get a couple scraps.”

“You make it sound so undignified,” Peter sighs. “You know, in ancient Egypt, they worshipped scavengers like jackals, making them key to obtaining a peaceful afterlife. Those people understood that death is hardly the end, and certainly not free.”

“Yeah, so the employee discount, that’s always going to help, right?” Stiles snorts.

He puts the car into park and then gets out. Lydia’s already halfway to the cemetery fence, turning slowly this way and that like she’s just enjoying the beautiful landscaping, and not at all paying attention to the funeral going on at the top of the hill. A couple of the attendees do look their way, but less because of her and more because of Derek, who’s got an umbrella slanted over his shoulder like it’s a rifle. They stop looking once he opens that and holds it out to Stiles.

It’s only drizzling, but Stiles takes it anyway. Derek steps back, slouching against the side of the car. With the mirrored shades and his hands jammed into his jeans pockets and the collar of his leather coat popped, he looks shady as hell and Stiles rolls his eyes and reaches up and at least takes the sunglasses.

Under them Derek looks more sober than seething, unusually enough. “How long do you think you’ll be?” he says. “Want me to pull the car around and meet you at the other gate?”

“Nah,” Stiles says. He tilts the umbrella for Peter to duck under it, and then gives in and lets Peter get a reassuring nuzzle at the side of his head. “Weather’s okay, and anyway, neither of you are in any rush.”

When he says that, he reaches up and gives Peter’s shirt-collar a tug. Peter dips his head in acknowledgement, a bit stiffer than you’d think, and on his way back up, he gives Stiles a sidelong glance that’s all appreciation, but what he’s appreciating is a bit of a mix. He wants it more than he’ll ever regret it, that’s for sure, but lately he’s been looking like he really understands what he’s ended up wanting. It looks like the kind of thought he hasn’t had too often.

“No,” Peter finally says.

Derek grins and Peter shoots him an annoyed look, which just makes Derek grin more. “Fine, just let me know,” Derek says to Stiles. “I’ll come after.”

“Sure, yeah,” Stiles says, tugging Peter after Lydia, who’s standing by the gate, an impatient look on her face. Time to go see who they’re after now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Incidentally, for a long time, Anubis was associated with a species thought to be a type of jackal, but that has since been reclassified as a type of wolf.


	7. Epilogue 2: Erica

They keep _following_ her, for some goddamn reason.

When Erica walks out of that room, Boyd’s chill at her back, she doesn’t want to see a single thing that reminds her. Nothing. It’s not like—it’s not like she just wants to stick her head in denial and just act like it never happened. That’s impossible; she knows now that death does the exact opposite of wiping your memory, and even if she trusted an alpha to put their claws anywhere near her neck, she doesn’t think that that would do the trick either. They can take the memories but they can’t put anything in, and she thinks she’d notice holes like that.

It’s just that she wants to stop _thinking_ about it for a little bit. She can’t get rid of what happened to her but she sure as hell can do something besides dealing with it all the time. She thinks she’s earned the goddamn break.

But those dumb pushing-their-luck twins keep popping up. Lurking around the edges, slinking away whenever Erica turns around, but near enough so that she smells them, hears them, senses them. It makes her want to call Stiles and Lydia back up.

Erica didn’t put _all_ her money towards their fee. Sole heir of her whole pack, she’s got enough to live on for the rest of her life, if she wants that to be quiet and on the downlow. Or it’s enough for a big, blazing Vegas exit. She…thinks about Vegas, but she ultimately just splurges on one expensive spa day and a hot-oil treatment for her hair, which has been edging back towards pre-bite frizz with all the traveling and shitty hotel shampoo, and then she buys a clunker and drives aimlessly around for a while. Stays in cheap motels, the kind where sometimes assholes come up at the ice machine and ask her what her rate it. Eats diner food.

She’s chilling, she thinks, and tells Boyd so. “If I wasn’t a werewolf, this would totally just be your great American road breakdown,” she says, lying on the bed. “No big deal, just another coming-of-age story, keep on going.”

There are ways she and Boyd can ‘talk’ without the others around, but they cost Boyd a lot of energy, and she thinks he’s got less of that now. Not really sure how or why she thinks that, but he just feels…quieter. His cold spot drifts around near her but it’s just cold. It doesn’t make her jump anymore, and she should be happy about that. Boyd deserves better than to hang around her for whatever she’s supposed to do now; she never got a straight answer out of Stiles or Lydia, and never got a chance to ask Stiles’ dad, what ghosts get to move onto, but she’s pretty sure it’s more fun than watching her drift here and there.

The cold spot comes back, crossing one of her hands, and Erica smiles and begins to curl her fingers like she can wrap them around it, and then—she heaves out an annoyed sigh, twisting her head to the side. Stares at the far wall. “Jesus Christ,” she says. “You’d think they could at least do some fucking research.”

But the whimpering keeps up. Erica turns her head back and looks at the ceiling, then closes her eyes and puts her hands over her ears. Then pulls her hands away, and herself up so she can grab a pillow. She tries to wrap the pillow around her head and then gives up and yanks herself off the bed.

“ _Christ_ ,” she snarls, storming out of her room. She walks over to the next one and then breaks the deadbolt and walks in and stares at the idiots huddled together on the bed. “Christ, are you fucking braindead or what?”

They stare at her. She stares back, and…and she can only keep up the anger for so long before it fades to plain irritation, and she’s staring and yeah, they look pretty rough. Thin, haggard, waxy tone to their skin and hair, dark circles under their eyes, sick sweet tone to their scent. Kind of like what she figures she was like, when she finally got out of that fucking vault they were holding her in.

Erica snarls to herself, because—goddamn it, but she was trying to not go there again and she puts her hands up and pulls at her hair, and then drops her hands with a vicious near-scream of frustration. “Can’t you just take your alpha—”

“We didn’t even want to _be_ alphas,” one of them blurts out.

“We just wanted to get away from our pack,” the other one says.

“Yeah, whatever, then you should’ve fucking stopped there, right?” Erica says. “Oops, wait, nope, you didn’t. So boo fucking hoo, I feel _so_ bad for you.”

They flinch and then drop their heads. Honestly, they were barely managing to meet her eyes anyway, and if it’d been any other situation, she’d ding them for zeroing in on her chest.

If it’d been any other situation, she’d be feeling pretty awesome, lone omega having two alphas cringing in front of her. She was cool with her alpha, don’t get her wrong, but it’s human to just think how you’d do if you were up there. And also, those kinds of thoughts and Boyd were about all she had to hold onto, sitting in that vault and Erica spins half-around, snarling again.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” she mutters, staring at the wall, the one her and their rooms share. Sure—the obvious idea, just go ask for a different room. Or make them ask. Or just drag their asses out and make them sleep by the dumpster.

But like that’s going to work. There’s just…nothing around it. She’s gonna be dealing. She’s gotta deal.

“And you fuckheads,” she says, turning back. She snorts when they twitch down, like that’s hiding the three clear inches they’ve crept over the bed towards her. “You think I’m gonna deal with _your_ shit…I’m not your mama. I don’t even _like_ you. You see what’s looking back at you in the mirror, you do your own facing up.”

They don’t say shit, just stare at her without staring at her. Erica snorts again and stalks to the door, then looks at them.

“What the hell are you still doing there?” she snaps. “You think I’m gonna stand here all night?”

She goes back to her room without looking back. They get the door. The one to the hall, anyway. Erica gets the one to the bathroom and then jerks her hand at it, making pointed sniffing noises, and they at least get that much, get their asses into the shower. She’s listening to their bare feet slap around as she flops back onto the bed.

“Yeah, probably not,” she says, feeling a chilly breeze over one side of her face. “I’m still not okay with them. But I’m gonna fucking kill them otherwise, and if they get to me…I’m not letting them get to me. Not again. That’s where we’re gonna start.”

Boyd pulls up enough energy to flutter her bangs across her forehead. She’s not sure what that means and…and honestly, she’s just too tired to try and figure it out. Even for her one, her best, her friend who got himself killed to give her a chance. Not even for him. She’s just—she’s gotta do for her. She’s got to get that straight, if she’s going to make that chance good, and everybody, _everybody_ , they’ll just have to wait.

“That’s it,” she says quietly, closing her eyes. “That’s it.”


	8. Epilogue 3: John and Chris

There’s this story.

Well, there are a few stories. There’s the one about the redheaded woman who shows up right before a family—rich, socially prominent, powerful—is about to collapse in on itself in madness and murder. The one about the young couple who are honeymooning when they start to notice strange things happening in the apartment across from their window, and they end up turning the whole town inside-out with uncovered scandals—and then disappear, as if _they_ were never there. Or the story about the man—he’s usually young, wholesome-looking—who laughs and jokes his way into trouble, in over his head, and when he vanishes, what people start to remember are the two strange men who always appeared a little after him, like they were tracking him down. Though neither the young man nor his pursuers turn up when they start finding the bodies.

Those stories have been going for a while now. There are older ones, about a father and his two kids, and then there’s the new one.

Raise your hand if you’ve heard it. Two men drive in. Both blond, older, respectably dressed. A lot of people think they’re itinerant missionaries, because they’re soft-spoken and polite, and they don’t seem to mind listening to ramblers and ranters. Occasionally somebody suggests they might be romantically inclined, seeing as they book a single hotel room, and usually stick together.

Not too much happens when they’re in town. They eat out, maybe are spotted at a local laundromat, are seen walking out of the woods with hunting and fishing gear in hand. They mix enough with the locals to not seem standoffish, but don’t involve themselves with people’s business. Except…

Somebody ends up going to that hotel room of theirs. The details are always different: invited, not invited, expressly warned off, sheer curiosity, greed for money and violence, intolerance mixed with bad judgment. It doesn’t matter, really. Somebody ends up in that room, when the two men are in it. And that somebody comes back out, and they’ve got a shake in their hand, a frightened jump in their step. They do things they would never, ever have done before. Confess to things, a lot of the time.

What happens in that room is up for debate. People will say things, screaming in bed from a nightmare, or dead drunk, or in last notes, but those kinds of things are always a little doubtful, incomplete, out of bounds. They’re probably not that close to the truth.

Anyway, the next day—when the hotel staff go in, the room is always clean. Clean and tidy, almost as if nobody used it at all. Maybe the sheets have a few wrinkles in them. Maybe the water glasses have been used, and the thermostat’s been adjusted a few degrees. But that’s nothing, that doesn’t say anything.

The two men are gone, too. And what’s left…it’s better to know than not know, they say. But you ask anybody who tells this story, and they’ll always say the same thing: they hope those men don’t come back. And sometimes they’ll say, you know, some things? Some things should just stay dead and buried.

So that’s the story. They don’t.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This epilogue owes a lot to various urban legends and folklore, including the Men in Black and the Bob Dylan song _Man in the Long Black Coat_.


End file.
